The country is in a crisis as a whole generation of young people exit our education and training systems, just to be left floundering on the end of the dole queue without purpose or prospects. This article attempts to redress the balance and suggest strategies to deal withe the problem.

1. A Blog for Britain’s Young Unemployed:
‘generating futures’
by
Duncan Bolam
A few months ago I got a call from the BBC to originate some ideas for an upcoming
series, ‘Up for Hire’, on BBC Three. I don’t recognise the DNA of many of my ideas in the
show that I witnessed as I sat in the studio audience last night, but it has been a thrill to
be involved in a show creating such a buzz and getting such an important topic on the
media radar.
The 4 show series, condensed into a single week, tracked the job search fortunes of 4
long-term unemployed young people, 2 graduates and 2 non-graduates. At BBC Centre in
London last night, after the show, it was great to speak to Kirsty and Chris, two of the
recruits, and see them brimming with the confidence of the kick-start the show has
injected into their early careers.
Watching each of the four ‘recruits’ grow from pretty dreadful first attempts at the
‘minimum wage’ jobs they did in the fun park on Monday night and gradually, show-by-
show, gain traction each night, to ultimately transform into purposeful workers by last
night (Thursday 20th October) has truly been a feat to behold. But to meet them in the
flesh was to sense their palpable sense of positivity and focus.
They had grown from 4 hapless, clueless youngsters bumbling through the minefield of
joblessness, into purposeful adults in what seemed like a 72 hour blinking-of-an-eye over
the course of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night’s extended 1½ hour
show.
These four young people grew tangibly, of that there is no doubt. Yet where I am left is
with a feeling of regret, not warmth and optimism. For these young people are four out of
an unemployed population of 1 million young people in this country trying to break
through. As a nation we really ought to be ashamed of ourselves for getting in such a
mess and leaving the next generation of workers in the dole queue before they’ve even
smelt success.
As most family values focus on breathing opportunity for growth, development and, above
all security, in the lives of our young, we should as a nation - an extended family - feel
remorse for how we are kicking our young people in the teeth as we are in 2011. The
unemployment epidemic hitting our young people is destructive and threatens to ruin a
whole generation who will take years to absorb the shock wave.
My early career was blighted by the failures of Thatcherism to tackle youth unemployment
and I had soul-destroying experiences of YTS (Youth Training Schemes) and YOPs (Youth
Opportunity Programmes). These experiences marred my early career and took 10 to 15
years to recover from. We are about to repeat the same mistakes again.

2. At 32 I crashed into the buffers, having lost another job, having rolled with punches
throughout my twenties, I was dumped out of work again in the recession of the early
90s. My previous 15 years I’d often liken to sprinting down a dry grassy slope barely able
to keep my feet beneath me. Having left home at 17, it was a constant fight for self-
preservation and sanity.
However, I then got my first real career guidance interview with an inspiring Career
Guidance Practitioner, who sat me down and helped me dissect, consider and reconstruct
my ‘career attributes’. The effect was transformational. I clearly had no clue who I was or
what I could amount to before the experience and, as the 4 ‘Up for Hire’ recruits I saw
grow on TV this week, my life suddenly began to gain traction.
Within 2 years I had studied a year’s postgraduate diploma in Career Guidance, survived a
Probationary Year as a Careers Adviser, and taken on a Special Needs caseload working in
schools and colleges looking after the fledgling career decisions of mainstream students
alongside ‘the gifted and talented’ and learners experiencing emotional and behavioural
problems. Their gaining traction instilled an immeasurable job satisfaction within me.
Working with the young people and seeing the results I was achieving with my career
decision making method heralded the genesis of my Career Dovetail Formula; based upon
my repeated discovery that my clients had little or no self awareness on the one hand,
and on the other virtually zero awareness of the kinds of jobs that existed in the labour
market. In essence, the laws of probability meant it would be unlikely they would ever fall
into the best career path to capitalise their innate career attributes as most people seemed
to entrust the bridging of childhood to adulthood to luck rather than fore-planning.
Positively leveraging our intrinsic qualities gives each of us a sense of self-affirmation and
meaning to get-on in our lives. I get really pissed-off when people say it’s okay to
randomly squander our talents and to allow young people to bump through job-after-job
never really discovering a sense of purpose and more often than not, becoming
increasingly demoralised.
It’s bullshit to say it isn’t important to invest in career decision making early. We seem to
have got used to living in a world where mucking around and never planning a course
towards our future is okay; a world where it is not ‘pc’ to mention failure. That might have
worked in our land of plenty, but let me tell you the party is over – really over – especially
for the young people trying to start-out and feed a family today.
A whole new generation of young people are going to starve if they are not tuned-in to
the power of their vocational abilities. For the next decade life will be a challenge for
anyone who dares leave the education and training system not able to stand up on their
own two legs and steer a course towards a well-specified career goal. The days of bling
are over – fake sparkle doesn’t cut-it anymore – it’s the real deal now. The day of
judgement has arrived – career judgement. Lay firm foundations, construct solid job
structures, build sustainable futures. And repeat.
For too long we have taken accountability away from politicians, educators, parents and
young people. Our commercial arena is simply not getting the skills it needs to remain
competitive. Organisations are filled with under-performers; a Herculean, tiny minority
prop up the rest. Katie Hopkins made some unhelpful inflammatory remarks on ‘Up for
Hire’ as an alleged expert on the subject of higher education. However, had she tempered
her melodramatics into greater poignancy – she would not have murdered any hope of a
constructive debate – because hidden within her tantrum were some bitter home-truths.

3. The UK labour market simply cannot absorb 50% of school-leavers going on to achieve a
degree – “mickey mouse” – or otherwise. It is true that there are some morbidly indulgent
degree pathways that rank alongside the most far-fetched I’ve ever heard of: a degree in
the Vulcan language! Indirectly, it is great that the inimitable Ms Hopkins has catapulted
this topic into the media; albeit toxically. But let’s bring this debate’s temperature down to
a simmer and take a more objective look at what is going wrong with youth
employment.
‘UK Inc’, as Prime Minister, John Major, once referred to it, has a finite labour market
capacity – in real-time. It is more or less of a fixed size. Year-on-year for the last 3 years
this market has shrunk. This is frightening even when it does not take into account the
terrifying demographics with our population growing at 500,000 p.a. a shrinking teenage
population and a seemingly, ever-growing and bulging population of pensioners in need of
a workforce to generate the interest on their investments. To be globally competitive
surely we ought to be properly auditing what our labour market has and what our labour
market needs?
Teetering on the cliff-edge of an economic disaster, the UK has a grave choice to make.
Either we equip our young people with the self awareness, labour market awareness and
self-assuredness that a competitive marketplace needs or continue into some kind of
national trance; a self-denial zone where the ship is really sinking but we’re not capable of
accepting reality.
We’ve led an entire generation up the garden path thinking they don’t have to stand on
their own two feet to survive (could this be ‘welfare syndrome’ an unfailing sense of being
provided for and never having to do anything to survive?). We’ve convinced them that it is
okay to base our whole ambition on a set of wannabe X-Factor principles where everyone
is going to put food on their table by signing badly? Bear in mind the miniscule percentage
of successful wannabes, as opposed to the legions of auditionees who go home empty?
Yet week-after-week, everyone is glued to their goggle box waiting to get famous. Or
know someone famous. To fawn.
The same mentality seems to have hijacked the country’s training systems. A combination
of union might and political incompetence killed our once illustrious apprenticeship
frameworks. As a nation we have not adjusted to the demise of our heavy industries and
stepped-up to the demand for future-facing industries. We now copy rather than innovate.
We perpetuate the ‘brain-drain’ through not empowering REAL TALENT; the kind of talent
that authentically contributes to society and generates good will as well as good taxes.
Our economy has lapsed into reactivity, and the paradox is that within the space of people
lives, still with us today, we’ve gone from top - and year-after-year – we’re slipping further
down the league tables. The reality is that unless we (the UK) approach this problem
differently, we are on course for Third World status within a lifetime.
As I have written elsewhere, our country’s obesity epidemic is just a metaphor for what
we’re like inside as a nation. We’re not dedicating out skills, forgetting how to apply them
and have taken our eyes of the prize; only a few of us are genuinely conscientious. It has
been too easy during a prolonged period of plenty to get lazy. And out of this lull have
come certain degree courses that might as well be millstones around our young people’s
necks when what they need is some impetus and a lifejacket.

4. In addition to reaping the backlash from dreadful economic policy, when Gordon Brown
was prancing around in his invisible suit, and all the policy-makers and the voters were so
intoxicated by the endless stream of cheap money they daren’t tell him that he’d
torpedoed his own ship, we have started killing-off and demolishing the whole
superstructure that helped target the needs of young people and give them a helping-
hand in working their future out.
In spite of announcing the launch of an ‘All-age’ National Careers Service in November
2010, John Hayes has done a U-turn and, having closed the vast majority of the country’s
careers centres, he has replaced it with a national helpline phone number (he caved-in to
Gove). Mindlessly, at just the time the nation needs it most, virtually the whole of the
professionally qualified careers profession has been made redundant. When was the last
time an entire specialist workforce was put out of work and the media didn’t give a hoot?!
The standard retort is that no one ever received helpful guidance from their Careers
Adviser. I know this subjective view to parallel bad restaurant reports. A restaurant can
give pleasure to 999 customers, but it only takes the 1000th to spread bad reviews and
spells disaster. There are some remarkably inspiring Careers Advisers working in this
country. And it seems through our period of plenty we have found a way of feeling we just
don’t need them anymore. We will live to regret it. Or at least our economy will… and then
our children… and then their children’s children.
Consider what success might look like for a moment:
• We gear-up our National Careers Service to partner with industry leaders and help
them envision what our country needs to construct an economically dynamic labour
market.
• We do the numbers – we properly audit the shortfall in skills and we work to facilitate
an education process that produces those skills.
o Four years ago we were massively oversubscribed by qualifying medical
students where supply outstripped demand for their skillsets.
o Two years ago a Law graduate could not get onto the all-important training
year with law firms because all the law firms were shedding staff to keep
their firms afloat.
o Yet few of the universities tempered their approach to offering places and
we all sat watching as the water in the ship started to lap at our knees.
• As Draconian as it might sounds, we sanity-check all degrees on the basis of the
contribution they make to society. And no, this doesn’t have to be the death of the
Arts!
o We ensure all young people who embark upon a degree course or
apprenticeship understand the destination and job prospects that pathway to
the workplace holds for them. They consider their prospects ahead of time.
• We reinstate Careers Action Plans for school and university leavers to capture each
stakeholder’s commitment to the chosen career pathway.
• We start career counselling, competency identification and aptitude assessment earlier
in school to enable young people to build upon the momentum derived from known
strengths not a never-ending quest.
• We set-up a national computer database which accurately describes the tapestry of
jobs in our economy and interfaces it with labour market supply.
• We knit our labour market-together to build a congruent, integrated and sustainable
system where commercial, economic and labour market demand are in relative
alignment.

5. We have the technology!! We can rebuild our labour market. But we need some visionary
thinkers to takeover the helm of the ship and steer a course to more fruitful waters. As it
stands, our problem is that we are welded to convention at a time when we need pioneers
to invent new ways of thinking and give them the support they require to turn our ship
around. Everyone possesses a real talent for something. Let’s help them develop.
As good as ‘Up for Hire’ was on the BBC this week they missed an opportunity to truly
inspire. There was an elephant in the TV studio; not once did they properly tackle the
subject of career planning. Nobody seems to have noticed but me. The ‘career guidance’
phrase wasn’t even uttered; (although this is partly the fault of the career guidance
profession for never getting their PR right – but that’s another story!)
My final point comes back to the difference that was made on four young people’s lives
when experts and experienced workers invested a few hours in their development. Each of
those youngsters was despondent due to long term unemployment and a lack of any
prospects existing on the horizon. The relatively short time it took to turn them on to how
exciting their prospects could be, if they only knew, created electricity in each of them and
transformed their outlook for the good – and for good.
It is time to catalyse a movement where Government neglect can no longer be a factor in
the future of our young people’s careers. There is a way of turning this ship around. We
need a lobby to turn this ship around and we need it today.
Jamie Oliver famously coined the phrase that our schools are ‘nutritionally barren’.
Today I want to warn everyone reading and ask that you repeat my words to everyone
you know because we are also ‘vocationally barren’!!
I am launching The Purpose Foundation to help young people lay the foundations of
purpose in their lives and to partner with industry to recover our industrial excellence.
Together we can get the numbers right and tailor education and training systems that not
only turn-out well-rounded and well-adapted young people, but in addition we generate
unprecedented momentum in our industry with the aim of becoming a truly sustainable
economy so that our children’s, children’s legacy is one worth inheriting.
Not like the one we’re leaving them now.
Get in touch for your copy of the: The Purpose Foundation Manifesto
If you are interested in supporting this initiative please sign-up at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Purpose-Foundation-supporters
Once we have enough support, we can build something truly inspiring from there!