This has been quite a week for reports.
On 1st May, Policy Connect published the final report of its “Earning or Learning” inquiry – a cross-party, 15-month piece of work that drew on 200-plus stakeholders, 75 written submissions, and direct engagement with young people across the UK. It is thorough, well-evidenced, and rightly concerned. The Institute of the Motor Industry (The IMI) sponsored it, so our sector has been reflected.
Three days later, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (The IFS) published its own analysis showing that the share of 16- to 24-year-olds on a UK payroll has fallen by 4.3 percentage points since December 2022. That is roughly 330,000 young people who have quietly slipped out of payrolled employment in three years – without a pandemic, without a banking collapse. The NEET cohort now sits at 957,000 and is fast approaching the one-million mark that policymakers have long treated as a symbolic red line.
Meanwhile, a detailed labour market analysis has been doing the rounds on LinkedIn, documenting how AI is systematically eliminating the entry-level roles that young people have historically used as their first foothold in work. Entry-level postings requiring 0 – 2 years of experience have dropped by 29 percentage points since 2024. In UK tech, graduate roles fell 46% last year. The so-called “learning curve” – those tasks, responsibilities and expectations that we all have when starting out in the world of work that develop our “work-readiness”, are being automated out of existence.
I have read all of these. They are important. Some of the smartest people working on this problem have poured considerable effort into them.
And yet…
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The IFS said it better than I can
Jonathan Townsend, UK chief executive at The King’s Trust, which co-funded the report, included a comment that I think deserves to be read slowly:
“These findings should concern anyone who cares about young people’s futures,” he said. “Too many young people are already out of work, education or training, and this analysis suggests we cannot simply assume the problem will correct itself as economic conditions improve.”
The evidence base is now substantial. We know that almost one million young people are NEET. We know the specific sectors where the apprenticeship pipeline is depleted, including automotive.
The IMI’s own data shows automotive apprenticeship starts are 20 – 25% below pre-pandemic levels. There are 17,000 unfilled vacancies in the sector right now. Under-19 starters dropped four percentage points in a single year.
We do not need to reach perfect understanding of every driver before we act. We need to act, and learn from what we do.
The broken bridge isn’t just a metaphor
Tom Keighley, who is building a job-matching platform designed specifically for Gen Z, has been writing about what he calls the “broken bridge” between young people and entry-level work. His diagnosis is this: the problem isn’t only that young people aren’t ready for work. It’s that the employer side of the equation has quietly retreated. The bridge is broken at both ends.
This feels true to me in automotive. Our sector has an extraordinary offer for young people – tangible, skilled, hands-on work that is evolving rapidly. We are not in the sectors where AI is eating the entry-level floor. If anything, we should be a magnet right now for young people looking for a career ladder that still exist.
And yet, starts are falling. Not because the funding isn’t there – it is stronger than it has been in years. Not because the jobs aren’t there – the vacancies are sitting unfilled. The barrier is action. Specifically, the action that employers, training providers, and sector bodies take before a young person even makes it to the application stage.
What “doing something” actually looks like
I want to be careful not to just swap one form of talking for another. So here is what I think concretely needs to shift.
For employers: Stop waiting for September.
Apprentices can start any time, and every month you delay, the candidate who would have been your best hire is starting somewhere else. More than that, your existing apprentices are your most powerful recruitment tool. The story a third-year apprentice tells a young person considering automotive is worth more than any job advert. Are you using it?
For sector bodies and policymakers: The Youth Guarantee is a step. The government’s £1 billion youth employment package is a step. The Policy Connect report’s recommendations are sensible. But the IFS is right that we need clearer metrics, clearer accountability, and faster feedback loops between what we fund and what actually changes. NEET reduction by 2050 is not a plan. It is a hope.
The seniority cliff is coming
One thing in the AI disruption research that has not made it into the mainstream NEET conversation yet – and it should – is what analysts are calling the “seniority cliff.”
If companies stop hiring juniors now because AI can do the rote work, they are not just creating a NEET problem for today. They are hollowing out the pipeline of senior expertise for 2030 and beyond. The people who will become your experienced technicians, your workshop managers, your leaders, are the apprentices you do or don’t hire this year. You cannot fast-forward that. A senior technician is built over a decade of solved problems and learned judgement. If we close the door on the entry point, we don’t just lose the juniors, we lose the seniors they would have become.
In automotive, the skills required by 2035 are estimated to be entirely different from those required today (electric vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, connected technology) so this is not a far-away concern. The skills transition will bury us if we don’t build the pipeline now.
So, where does that leave us?
I am not dismissing the reports. The research matters.
But, I also think the people in our sector – employers, providers, sector bodies, the young people themselves – deserve a more honest conversation about what comes next. Not more description of the problem. A plan. A name on it. A number to hit. A date.
The Policy Connect report says it wants the UK to have the lowest NEET rate in the OECD by 2050. I appreciate the ambition, but I’d like to know what the metric is for this time next year. Who owns it?
Until then, we’ll keep doing what we can in the bit of the system we can reach: getting more employers in automotive to start earlier, recruit better, and support their apprentices more consistently. It is not a silver bullet, but it is something you can actually do on a Tuesday.
If you want to talk about what that looks like for your business, book time with me here
