By Francisco Santos

Employability is usually found at the top of the list of priorities for young people, particularly students, as well as the universities that employ them. However over the last few years there seems to have been a rise in the number of unemployed young people, so how did this happen and how can they combat it?

As the chart above shows, over the last couple of years there has been a significant increase in the number of 16 to 24 year olds who are NEET.

NTU Associate professor and expert in career development, Ricky Gee, gives his thoughts on the matter saying: “The economy’s not in a good way, and there is evidence to suggest that when the economy’s not doing well, when capitalism’s in crisis, that it is when minority groups get hit, and I would include youth within that, because young people are not as well established, they don’t have the same level of capital as people who are older.”

“We have had 14 years of a Tory government who really didn’t care about young people at all, if we go back to the 2000s there was an awful lot of support for young people, there was Sure Start for children, there were connections for teenagers and a whole host of other sorts of interagency organisations that were around at that point to provide opportunity to young people, and that’s all been stripped away.”

Adding: “All of those support mechanisms have been taken away from them, so it’s not just at the point of where they go to look for work, it’s through that whole part of the life course. So they might not have had the support when they were babies, they might have struggled at school, they might not have gotten diagnosed for dyslexia, for example. And as a parent myself, when you go through that yourself, you realise how difficult it is to get additional support for children.”

This is something that can be seen in a city like Nottingham, with a  high population of young people, which seems to reflect the significant difference it shows in its rate of employment compared to other areas of the UK.

In addition, Nottingham being home to two universities in a relatively small city, makes it especially contentious for young graduates looking for a job.

Gee elaborates on this with an analogy: “If we compare being employable to a game of musical chairs – I find this a good way to describe it to my students – if we’re playing musical chairs and you take away 50% of the chairs in the game, suddenly everyone in that game is not as good at the game anymore, so if we transfer that to employability, if you take away an awful lot of jobs and opportunities, people instantly become less employable.

“Then we got the other difficulty in terms of the labour market, it’s not an equal playing field, so there are some people playing this game of musical chairs who have literally been advised and told that ‘you don’t have to move while playing this game’, ‘you can literally just sit with your bottom an inch off the chair’.

“They’re in a very privileged position and then just as soon as the music stops they’re just going to plunk themselves down on the chair, so we can compare that to people who are privately educated.

“So not only have you got this game of musical chairs when loads of chairs have been pulled away, there’s some people who aren’t even in the room playing the game and there are others who are sat right by a chair.”

This, together with the aforementioned stripping away of support, makes for a much more unstable job market for young people, as illustrated in the chart above, when compared to the overall unemployment rate.

Professor Gee also offers a few words regarding ways to improve this, saying: “So you shouldn’t just make students themselves responsible for their own employability, what we should be doing is A – providing opportunities for students and B – making students aware of the unfair terrain of the labour market so that they’re not going into that blindly.

“I have had some criticism saying ‘well, if you’re telling young black males they’re highly discriminated against in the labour market, aren’t you just going to kill their enthusiasm?’ And it’s like, no, I’m telling them that so they go with their eyes wide open, but also if I’m telling all my students about these things, then hopefully they’re going to be tomorrow’s leaders, so hopefully they’re in a position where they can look out for these inequalities they can challenge policy and say ‘no, we should be recruiting from diverse populations, we should be giving people as much of a chance to gain opportunity as possible’.”

He also encourages students to do what the universities suggest them to, such as doing internships, joining societies and building their CV, but beyond that he urges them to think critically about the labour market, the barriers they may face, and how to dodge and change them.

Also focusing on workers rights, adding: “I teach about unionisation, for example, and the vast majority of our students don’t know about unions. So I talk about how you can join a Union to change that, because individually, you’re weak, but collectively, you’re in a much stronger bargaining position.

While concluding he also adds the importance of researching the areas people are going into, and being able to connect with people inside of them, building a professional network.

Ending with: “That’s how you become really employable rather than just having a good CV and having a first, it’s about building that social capital, building those networks and being aware though that the inequalities need to be challenged rather than just accepted.”