A million young people aren’t in a job or training. Britain has a problem | Richard Partington

1 day ago7 min read

The latest employment figures landing on Britain's desk are the financial equivalent of a series of bounced checks, revealing a deep and troubling deficit in the nation's human capital. With almost a million young people disengaged from education, employment, or training—a cohort chillingly abbreviated as NEETs—the UK is staring down a systemic failure that no amount of short-term fiscal stimulus can easily fix.The jobless rate ticking up to 4. 8%, a four-year high, isn't just a statistic; it's a story of stalled potential and a generation's side hustle being put on indefinite hold.Typically, such a sharp rise in unemployment is the hallmark of a full-blown recession, yet here we are, witnessing the erosion of over 100,000 payroll jobs in the past year alone, a quiet crisis unfolding without the dramatic economic collapse we're conditioned to expect. This isn't a simple market correction; it's a fundamental breakdown in the pipeline that connects talent with opportunity, a problem that personal finance gurus like Robert Kiyosaki would identify as a critical flaw in our collective financial literacy and economic architecture.The situation is compounded by the staggering figure of more than nine million working-age adults who are economically inactive, neither in jobs nor actively seeking them, a silent majority whose absence from the workforce creates a drag on national productivity and inflates the welfare burden on the state. For young people, the consequences are particularly acute; early career unemployment can create a 'scarring' effect, depressing lifetime earnings and eroding confidence in a way that echoes for decades, a lesson anyone who has read 'The Richest Man in Babylon' would understand as a catastrophic delay in the power of compound growth, not just in wealth but in skills and professional networks.The government's current approach feels akin to applying a band-aid to a compound fracture; while ministers are urged to do more, especially for those with disabilities or health conditions who face even steeper barriers, the solutions require a more entrepreneurial mindset. We need to think like startup founders looking at a broken market: where are the friction points? Is it a skills mismatch, where our education system is producing graduates for an economy that no longer exists? Is it a geographic mismatch, with jobs concentrated in high-cost urban centers while talent is left stranded in deindustrialized towns? Or is it a deeper cultural issue, where the gig economy has created a precarious workforce without the safety nets or career progression of traditional employment? The fintech revolution offers a potential blueprint, demonstrating how technology can democratize access and dismantle old gatekeepers.Imagine a similar disruptive energy applied to the jobs market: platforms that offer micro-internships, AI-driven career coaches that identify transferable skills, or government-backed 'skill wallets' that give every young person a personal budget for lifelong learning, a concept that would make the authors of 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' nod in approval. The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it's a social time bomb.A generation left on the sidelines is a generation more susceptible to populist rhetoric, mental health crises, and a corrosive sense of disenfranchisement. The UK's problem is not just a number on a spreadsheet; it's a million individual stories of ambition deferred, and solving it will require the same pragmatic, forward-looking energy we apply to building a personal investment portfolio—diversifying opportunities, investing consistently in human capital, and understanding that the most valuable asset any country possesses is the untapped potential of its youth.

#lead focus news

#unemployment

#youth unemployment

#UK economy

#job market

#employment data

#economic outlook

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