Skills…

I’ve noticed recently that we get loads of job applications for positions we advertise – but the quality of applications is getting worse and worse.

Loads of graduates with no experience… hordes of people from other sectors who can’t demonstrate any suitability for the role… and recently more and more of the same AI-written CVs and cover letters.

It seems to me that the cause is the same as what’s causing the productivity crisis in the UK: we don’t have the right workforce for the roles that we need. It’s not just in construction and engineering, it’s nursing, medicine, dentistry and traditional trades. Businesses in every sector have difficulty in filling roles and most blame a lack of suitable candidates.

This is also causing a crisis among young people, who were sold the same old story that “You do well at school and go to university, then you get a good job” – but this isn’t the reality any more. Degrees don’t match the jobs available, so kids spend three years studying something they never use again and employers have to train new staff from scratch.

When I was young I studied Landscape Architecture and went straight into running my own landscape architecture business. People studied architecture and became architects, they studied medicine and became doctors, others studied art and became… art teachers.

Nowadays, the numbers of degrees only suitable for a career in research is way out of proportion with the positions available and we end up with a mountain of graduates who are only qualified for “entry level graduate jobs” – a category which almost doesn’t exist any more.

Since the 2008 financial crash, these entry level jobs have been reducing and employers prefer candidates with genuine workplace experience (or lower salary expectations) over inexperienced graduates. Automation and AI have only accelerated the trend away from recruiting young people and the types of degrees places available nowadays are even more out of whack with the jobs on offer.

The government has cottoned on to this and commissioned a review of higher education but a genuine strategy to resolve this problem is a generational project, completely reforming post-16 education – a system that’s not fit for purpose, that doesn’t provide the economy with the workers it needs and that doesn’t give most young people meaningful opportunities for a career.

Skilled worker visas are a sticking plaster – particularly if we are going to elect a strongly anti-immigrant government in 2029. The glaring problem on the employment line, with youth unemployment running at over 14% – which is nearly 3x the headline unemployment figure, reflects the disconnect between the skills we need and the education that we provide.

Children don’t grow up dreaming of being a roofer or a brickie, but we need to bridge the gap between the dreams of a child and the reality for young adults who have been so badly let down by our education system that they now just dream of a job that can see them through to retirement – ideally something less soul-crushing than picking stock in a warehouse or riding an e-bike door to door delivering avocados and ice cream.