Get Britain Working is totally missing the current employment crisis economy

If we ever get growth incentivising policies, maybe after the next GE, then we have more of a chance for younger people.

You can see on threads on here how soul destroying this for young people graduating to no job. And those not graduating of course in the same boat.

It's a mixture. Brexit was a disaster and we had years of mismanagement from the Tories. The Labour Party have made their own mistakes and we are all dealing with the combined impact of all of it.

It was Inevitable. If you make it more expensive for businesses to employ people, they'll employ less people. Then you'll get less tax revenue along with more unemployed people to pay for and having insisted that you wouldn't repeatedly come back with more tax grabs, you now have to heap more tax an ever decreasing pool of tax payers. People who have already seen a big drop in living standards because of all of your other abysmal policies. Honestly fuck this government, hopefully it'll collapse long before the next election is due and we can get rid of them early.

It’s not the aftermath. It’s the current one. We don’t need these anti growth policies.

Given the number of jobs expecting 'flexibility' whilst giving part time contracts including evenings and weekends, and some nights, childcare needs to reflect these working hours. Usually these are low paid jobs as well.

I'm surprised nobody the government has considered semi residential for kids, you know, could be called 'boarding childcare', could be combined with school, so that low paid parents could work round the clock to just keep rent paid to landlords expanding their wealth.

DISCLAIMER: ABOVE IS SARCASM!

AI is overegged currently. Costing billions and billions for companies and nobody is even sure how they will get their money back eventually. It is being spun by big companies in the US and plenty of people are worried about a massive bubble there too.

Aftermath of Brexit and long term mismanagement by our own politicians. The problem is that other countries are looking for educated and talented people and plenty of us are extremely worried about a brain drain, not just of the very yougn but increasingly families too. Yet we have a Government in denial, yet again.

This worries me so much. I have an 18 year old son who thankfully went for an apprenticeship rather than university & he seems to be enjoying it. I've really tried to support him to be an 'all rounder' rather than just focus on good academic results e.g sport, job in a pub since he was 16, work experience at our local homeless team etc & I just hope this pays off for him & his future working life. I worry about A.I & how this impacts the future for our young people.

Thanks for clarifying. I think it's a really tough choice for young people now as to whether or not university is worth the investment. It was a no brainer for my dd because she wants to go into medicine, but I think it's a lot less clear cut for young people who want to go into fields that don't necessarily require a degree. Your ds should bear in mind that whatever he decides now doesn't have to be stuck to forever.

I think soft skills are always hugely valuable in almost any field, so definitely worth developing those - it is that side of things that we currently find to be lacking in many candidates to be honest.

I am not in the South East as we chose to move away for the very reasons that you describe, but to be honest, I think it's tough everywhere right now.

What we feel is lacking is more to do with communication, interpersonal skills and attitudes etc - things which are absolutely essential for our work but not so easy to train people

I suspect this is your problem - recruiting from a pool of people that can't train into the role. If that's your baseline requirement then I'm guessing those people are already ensconsed.

It sounds like you are dealing with (difficult customers/claimants/disadvantaged people) types.

So much of education and office based work is now task/outcome-driven and communication reserved for the water cooler on subjects like Strictly.

Working with people with empathy/sympathy is hard and involves caring - i dont think people want to do that much these days.

The work life balance seems more geared to bringing your life into work rather than bringing your work home.

FWIW we stopped recruiting - fed up listening to new graduates who thought they could do (and be paid top $ for) a job because they'd done a course in it rather than accepting that the course was the baseline for starting to learn the job properly.

@MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack

I wasnt trying to be disingenuous by asking the sector. My son is in work and thinking of going to university but he isnt sure of the value. He can see a shortage in construction, but if its not sector specific thing he can just keep developing his soft skills and not worry so much.

My dh also recruits engineers and they dont get good applications always. Relocation is a massive issue as we are in the south east and people think they dont want to trade thier 3 bed detached for a 2 bed terrace, if they are moving from elsewhere and arent used to south east housing. Relocating is much more fun if you head somewhere cheaper.

It hasn't been dd's experience either, thankfully. But one of her friends did move from another uni for similar reasons.

We welcome applications with transferable skills from other sectors and from people who have been out of the workplace for a while - we have comprehensive training programmes in place for new staff so we are confident that we can equip them with the technical skills and knowledge that they need to do the work.

What we feel is lacking is more to do with communication, interpersonal skills and attitudes etc - things which are absolutely essential for our work but not so easy to train people in. A lack of attention to detail is another common problem that we see. We also see quite a few candidates who appear to have turned up to the interview without having read the job description properly or looked at our website etc. I don't expect them to know everything, but wanting people to do a bit of very basic research about what they have applied for isn't unreasonable in my view.

We do find that CVs and/or written applications - we've experimented with various approaches - aren't always reflective of the quality of candidates at interview so we try to interview as many as we can. We do find that people who are strong on paper aren't always strong in person, and vice versa.

Can I ask what the issue is with the quality?

Is it that you're getting applications from people outside the sector you want?
Or lack of experience?
Or have been out of work for some time?
Or failure to evidence the base criteria?
Or personality/motivation not shining through?

Or are the CVs not representative of the candidates when you interview?

DD (second year uni) applied for 60-80 min wage jobs before getting one....it was an 8 hour contract,( 2 shifts per week) which was ok but ideally over summer she could easily have worked more. And not the same days each week so difficult to combine with another pt job. She was lucky she could earn enough in 12 hrs (if she could get an extra shift) but thats because she's a student living at home. She saved it to pay for the first month of uni

Shes just got another job in her uni town, again 8 hours/week over 2 shifts, some jobs she applied for were 9 hours/wk over 3 shifts so taking way more time (commuting/getting there) for the same money as just doing a day! DH thinks theyre all on short shifts so that no one has breaks

Another issue is the abysmal lack of support for childcare (Wales), especially if you have multiples. I've recently had twins, and work was in a tricky situation with a closure and an offer of another role elsewhere or redundancy. When I worked out the cost of full-time nursery for twins in addition to the travel expenses, I would be out of pocket returning.
I loved teaching, and I will miss it so much. But I can not work out how to make returning feasible until the girls are entitled to some funded hours, which isn't until 3.
I am fearful I will struggle to find anything if I'm out of work for so long.

I think we inherently have a strong work ethic in the UK. I don't know many people who enjoy or are happy being unemployed. But if two parents are working full time and struggle to make ends meet, there's no wonder unemployment is rising.

Im hearing this more and more . If people follow through and don’t work / save / pay tax the country is absolutely screwed .

That’s a shame. Ds hasn’t found that, thankfully.

Where I live (an isolated village) there isn’t a single job opportunity - the pre school, which was the last surviving thing we had, has just shut down because Labour changed the way it was funded and it had to shut. There is nothing else for miles and miles, and even there it’s ever more sparse.

That sounds miserable for your poor DS. I hope he will find his people eventually.

We have certainly seen candidates for graduate entry roles with very little get-up - and-go and really poor interpersonal skills etc. I wondered if covid might have been a factor for some of them having failed to develop the people skills - obviously there are lots of young people who have fabulous social skills, though, so I'm not really sure. I guess there are always multiple variables that feed into these things.

Ds is second year at a top university and tells us that he's struggling to make friends because the other students are so withdrawn and many can't even respond when they're spoken to. The majority aren't taking an interest in their degree, aren't studying or just doing the bare minimum to get by. I know it's traditional for students to drink a lot, but surely some must be interested in other things and be able to show a bit of personality. They don't even speak up in lectures. If these are the people showing up for job interviews then God help them.

Agreed. It’s not worth the stress. I’m down to 90% and just worked out that I could do 85% in a way that minimises childcare costs. Mulling it over…

I dont have a solution. I think my indirect point is just that small businesses can't afford those salaries without higher prices and its a vicous loop of seeing who will blink first. Usually the result is that the business closes which means less work available so higher unemployment, the knock on need for welfare.

If i was in charge, I would be looking closely at education and moving away from the standard academic route and look to promote 4 key GCSES: MATHS, ENGLISH, SCIENCE and a new combined humanities which pulls together the very basics and essentials of key dates, places and cultures. Look to get everyone a good solid rounding in those and from age 13, encourage a choice between academics or work skills training and focus classes appropriately. Group A focus on building a capable workforce straight fromschool: trades, warehouse work, management skills, business skills like accountancy and registering a company, organising insurance. Group B focus on the trickier academics for further education to become a solicitor, doctor, etc.

Currently we train children for university and that's not getting the right or most achievable outcome for most children.

People will always need an electrician, boiler fix, carpet, carpentry and these often pay well.

So i suppose my solution is training for work over training for education because its no longer the way out of poverty that it used to be.

Not so in my DDs trust, whole teams have gone, the move to saving money to move staff/care out into the Community is happening, also being done in a neighbouring trust too.

Obv i cannot speak for every trust.

As @MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack says, it’s sector dependent. I’ve heard similar from DHs former company. He’s now retired but recruitment is still difficult. Everyone knows the big players in a job sector but aren’t great at looking at the smaller players. His former company offers everything you mention too.

There are too many people who don’t have the skills for varied work in his profession so they aren’t suitable for many roles. It’s partly a university issue (too much maths) and partly large employers who compartmentalise grads into narrow focus jobs. Many applicants therefore simply cannot do the type of work DHs former company has. Even getting good grads isn’t easy. Often they are not very articulate and don’t possess suitable written or oral skills to converse with clients and some work they simply won’t engage with. Many seem short on ambition.

Getting the right people has never been easy. Often redundant people are sifted out from firms because they aren’t great. Firms retain the best employees and they don’t need to apply for other jobs. The ones who aren’t wanted are the ones in the market for jobs but they aren’t the right fit.

When jobs are taxed, money goes into paying taxes. It could have gone into training and support measures. The government and MPs simply don’t understand business and employment.