Time to bring back YTS?

[Lucelady]

We have a mental health crisis particularly with 16-24year olds.
It has taken my student daughter a year to get a part time job. It's soul distroying.
I belive that work, paid or voluntary is good for anxiety and MH issues. It also contributes to the public purse.
So why are these young people being refused interviews and jobs? I've noticed unless you have extensive experience in retail or hospitality you won't get a chance. No learning opportunities are being offered. More parents are going back to work due to the COL.
Who would you take? Experience or a rookie?
Many of my daughters grad friends are working in care homes. Good on them but we only have 800,000 vacancies for three million unemployed. 'working people' need jobs not soundbites.
Should big employers be incentivised to run these youth training schemes? I think so. It's got to be cheaper than benefits and a generation wasted.

The problem with yts, which many of my friends did ( I had an apprenticeship) we were all gone at the end of 2 years replaced by more free labour.

In my case, I was used as free labour and came away with no transferable skills !

Is the modern apprenticeship scheme not the current version of YTS? Companies get funding from the government to employ a young person and they do an NVQ alongside learning the job. It is true that many companies let them go after the year. It works out for some YP though. Perhaps the scheme needs to be widened or more vocational training made available. I think too many young people are encouraged to do university courses with no more chance of employment at the end than the person who did vocational training or an apprenticeship at 16/17/18.

Yts was sheer exploitation
It would have to better managed and with real training and learning experience whilst on the job.
The £25 a week in 82 for a forty HR week was a piss take even back then.

YTS aka "free boys and girls".
I had hoped that the apprenticeship scheme would be better but I don't think it is

This is why volunteering is so fabulous - you get real-life experience, a great sense of worth and when jobs come up in the sector you are often the first to hear about them and also you have a proven background within a specific arena. I work with community groups and they are all crying out for volunteers, particularly younger ones as it tends to be retired people with the time and who don't need to earn money. All of the volunteers I work with get training alongside their role in a range of areas - food preparation, health and safety - both of which are good benefits if she is looking to work in hospitality longer term.

yes there was a good storyline on Brookside about exactly this,

Its like National Service in the sense that its always suggested by people who would be too old to do it!

I think there definitely needs to be a version of it. I work in a Job Centre and wish there was more we could offer to support the 18-24-s.

I've said the same for years. No doubt at all that some were exploited, but I know several of my peers who did get skills, qualifications, professions, and good jobs out of it. One is now the managing director of our local chamber of commerce - I remember her first day there as a YTS trainee making the coffees - she stayed and worked her way up and is now on a six figure salary and influential in the local business community. I worked with another who is now a qualified accountant again after starting in the typing pool in the accountancy practice I worked at back then! Something is better than nothing, and even if they were "let go" after the time period, then at least they had work experience to put on their CVs to at least prove they could hold down a job!

The apprenticeship scheme has too many hurdles and hoops to jump through so it puts off employers, especially smaller employers.

It worked really well for my son, but appreciate many employers are not as good, and I know that sometimes when I’ve suggested a young person look into one that there hasn’t been anything suitable available.

The previous Govt stopped Traineeships and then wonder why NEET is at an all time high. We had a 100% success rate in Traineeships. Year in, year out.
Now they walk round my local town kicking pigeons.
There was, in succession
Youth Opportunity
Youth Training Scheme
Entry to Employment
Traineeships
Covering the last 40 years. 2 years ago, stopped.

An absolute disgrace.

I got a job thanks to the YTS scheme in the 80s. It worked for me, but I can imagine it would be harder to do these days as many employers may not want to participate and also the cost. I earned a pittance , but I enjoyed the work and they gave me tips on getting a job. I swear that having this on my CV helped me. I was always thankful for a chance.

Big employers use to offer key working 9- 2.30 and that has almost disappeared too. If you won't agree to cover any day you won't get the job.

I think a scheme that offers a years experience for a lower salary but higher than benefits has got to be worth trying

We don't have enough pyschogists and therapists to help young adults effected by Covid. I have a family member training to be a clinical psychologist but most people at BSc level will not go on to be clinicians. They go into marketing and HR. We are still charging our doctors £100k to qualify with no guarantee of a training contract. There have been plenty of threads highlighting this.

Our youth is being wasted. I'm really worried for the future.

Well when i applied for jobs employers did recognise workFARE on my CV They arent stupid. The one employer that wasnt bothered offered me a job in their sex chatline office where i worked for two and a half years, but other employers recognised job centre workfare schemes when they saw them on a CV

@ShinyAppleDreamingOfTheSea the problem with apprenticeships is there bloody difficult to get onto. My 19 year old son spent a year applying for anything and everything he could m hardly had any replies from the companies or interviews. He's gone back to college to get some more qualifications.

Same here

Apprenticeships often need Maths and English passes in GCSE so even more practical, skills based roles are out of reach of those who are not academic enough. Many of those youngsters might not be good at classroom learning but thrive in the real world workplace. We need to look past this idea that unless they can jump through the hoops needed for GCSE they are useless for other roles.

Real apprenticeships are hard to get,mech,sparky,etc.
The makey on apprenticeship such as shop floor at super drug, next it doesn't take a year or two years to train it takes a few months.
Next was one of the worst if offering a job it would be 16 hrs and most can't afford to work for that.

I do agree that we are utterly failing the current generation of young people. It's all very well castigating them for not working, but what jobs are they supposed to do? We need to invest in them, help them develop and learn new skills.

When I was at university in the 1980s almost everyone I knew was being paid for by one of the nationalised industries, they had a job guarantee and many of them were the first members of their family to go to university. Older people bang on about how youngsters should learn a trade, but have no idea how difficult this is. I know several tradies, not a single one of them can afford to take on and train an apprentice. Government needs to forget useless degrees and invest in technical colleges.

My first job was photocopying, typing letters, sending telexes (yes, I'm old) packing and sending parcels. You did this stuff but you got used to working alongside different people all this entry level work has disappeared, and it's even hitting the professions now, with graduates being replaced with AI.

Long term, it's a totally false economy, we cannot go on just importing cheap labour and leave our own young people sitting on the dole, no good for anything.

And the scrapping of our once World leading adult education system which means that "if" youngsters miss out on further education or study the wrong thing, their options to change direction are now extremely limited.

The difficulty of getting driving tests doesn't help either, this makes finding work much harder outside major towns and cities.

Anyone in education during covid is now seeing the effects.

I had friends who joined the YTS and had various placements with the council or beauty/hair. And those I know did get kept on afterwards.

We do need something similar but not with the poor allowance they used to get. Similarly I recall how you could do a college course, eg in Admin and the work placements were arranged by the college. Now many of these courses have gone and even schools expect students to find their own work experience, which often they can't.

And unfortunately for most of the 93% of students in state education they don't have careers officers.
So it makes it even more unequal (I'm not bashing as my DC went to both private and state schools).
How do we help?

Well, I think some of the problem lies with older people having to take on second jobs or needing to work for longer due to later retirement ages so they move across into entry level jobs. But they need the income too so why shouldn't they?

I think all our readiness to adopt online shopping hasn't helped either, together with self service tills there are far fewer retail jobs than there were when I was growing up. More hospitality I suppose though with coffee shops everywhere.