This country as gone into terminal decline

[Carmes]

I have 2 young children in school.

I am becoming more and more anxious about what sort of jobs / careers they will have open to them.

I work for very large company with 10,000s of employees.

20 years ago whe I started work here there would be 100s of entry level jobs at any given time. These are jobs that don't require experience or a degree, ideal for a school leaver, and I know dozens of people who started their career this way.

Now there are maybe 10 jobs that would fit the same criteria.so. All the jobs have been offshored.
Now are the vacancies are for very specific technical skill set or experience.

This doesn't bode well for someone who has left school at 18'or even university.

And before the jibes hit, my Dh is currently very seriously ill in a cardiac care unit being brilliantly looked after by committed nursing teams. More thinly stretched than anyone would want honestly but held together by professional routine and the Hippocratic oath.

Edited to say that I don't think anything could have been improved in this acute care phase, but that the administative processes that lost him for about two years routine monitoring might need sharpening.

Too many want paid cash in hand and don't declare it to the taxman.
I think they are stealing from the British public..
Those who are happy to pay cash in hand are just as bad.

Unfortunately the government has decided that without English and Maths GCSE you are deemed as too stupid to do anything

Exh didn’t have an English O level. It didn’t stop him getting a law degree. However now he would struggle to get a job as a shelf stacker

Quitting a role to go onto benefits would be completely outside my moral fiber. I appreciate people do this - I couldn't.

This doesn’t surprise me as our planning legislation is utterly pathetic. Where I live, a new estate (and primary school) is being built on a flood plain despite serious unresolved issues including flooding, inadequate estate access via a narrow country lane and a lack of secondary school places for the pupils of the new primary school.

Councillors voted in favour of the plans, not because they found them satisfactory, but because they knew that if they didn’t, the developers would take the council to court, win and leave them with a huge legal bill.

Since then, the developers have found their own solution to the lack of secondary school places in our town. They’ve arranged for their new primary school to be run by the same multi-academy trust as our local, outstanding secondary school. And for a change in the secondary school’s admissions criteria to guarantee places for pupils of the new primary school, even though they live outside the secondary school’s catchment area.

Yes, their solution to the lack of secondary school places for their new residents is to steal places from the children already living in the catchment area, close to the school.

No, it's not their fault, that is how their whole lives have been. Low expectations in school, most don't work, low expectations at home, and in the community.

Always allowed to get out of difficult things.

But allowing it to go in is not kind, whatever anyone thinks.

While it is certainly true not everyone is cut out for every job, I'm not sure I would say anyone has a "right" to be employed in a particular area they would prefer.

It is probably the case that we are producing too many people in certain areas. My own degree was in classical philosophy, there is a significant over-abundance of young academics looking for good academic jobs in that subject. There is no way there is work for all of them ,much less good work. A lot of them would have been better off to train as something else.

It's always been the case that some people don't exercise their main talents in their paid work. I have dinner with some musician friends tonight, all professional level musicians. Only one really works in music, and that is part time, he's in computers in his day job. The others are an engineer and a secretary.

There are jobs out there

However, some people do not want them because the hours do not suit their lifestyle

Some people do not want to work nights

Some people do not want to work rolling shifts

Some people want to work PT

Some people only want a job in the industry that they are particularly interested in

Etc

I don't live in the UK but plenty of young people here share flats. Why is it so impossible in the UK?

I'm so sorry to hear about your son.

People who write such crap are either a long way off the projected age when we are supposed to not want to live, or they are miserable gits who find little joy in life and imagine the rest of us to be the same.

This is becoming very much the norm. A by product of the "everyone must have a degree"mantra from the late 1990s...another stupid "New Labour" idea which stopped young people, many of whom were unsuited to undertaking degree courses taking decent apprenticeships and becoming skilled in higher paying jobs such as electrics, plumbing etc. One of the many reasons we have a completely ridiculous level of sickness/disability levels in young people who chose now not to work as stacking shelves doesn't appeal.

There are lots of jobs but people are more entitled than ever before

They don't want to work nights or shifts or weekends

They want to be paid an outrageous minimum wage of £12 per hour for an unskilled job

They don't want to do a job involving hard graft like being a bricklayer/ electrician/ plumber (I work in this field and talk to the owners of these companies who find it impossible to find apprentices who will actually stick at the job)

They want to work part time or WFH or have the work life balance which means they can pop out to pick the kids up from school

They expect everything handed to them on a plate

This has happened to my brother and my brother in law. Both in IT, massive levels of redundancy as a result of outsourcing, but my brother spends all his time explaining in great detail on the phone instructions on how to do basic things to people in India. ( we are Indian descent so not racism, just that these people aren't capable or trained properly but are cheap.) Virgin Media Customer Service outsourced is appalling, and the reason we left.

@M0rnington
"I think labour needs to sort out the right to work in Europe and give rewards to companies that don’t outsource abroad. "

No chance of that. Freedom of movement is also inextricably tied into open procurement across the single market above a fairly low threshold. There is no way the EU would agree to the U.K. erecting barriers such as that or incentives which amount to the same.

That is why pre leaving the EU you couldn't even realistically label goods by specific country of origin unless a protected type of food unique to a country, ie Camembert cheese

I agree to some extent. Certainly, the education system has been 'dumbed down', lots of young people have been sold an unrealistic dream at a time when there has been real decline in the UK (unlike for those in their grandparent's generation when things improved during their lifetimes) and there is also far too much destructive 'woke' imo. I also agree that long term benefits do not help people except for those in real need, although, of course, the help is simply not available to get the others back into work.

However, your post does read like something from the Daily Mail or Torygraph and you have ignored the points I made about economic mismanagement in the UK and many other countries and the impact that it has had. What do you mean by 'most don't work'? Do you have children/ grandchildren? Do none of them work at all? If that's the case, I guess something has gone wrong in your family because all of my family did or do work (although my mother, now elderly, only ever worked for around 5 years). Have you never had a conversation with a young person? Your generalisation is clearly ridiculous. Imagine my surprise when you say in the next post that you have a degree in Philosophy! This is far more complicated than young people being given low expectations at school and home. The economic factors have had a huge impact and have massively disadvantaged the young. You could say they have been discriminated against by successive governments. Now, some have simply given up, which is a natural response. This is not just a phenomenon. It has happened in other countries, including the US and China.

Parts of the U.K. (mostly south east) have insane house prices but London has always been expensive - my parents couldn't afford to buy there in the 70s

My dad was a single man working as a filing clerk and bought a 4 bedroom home by himself in the mid-70s. Where did your parents want to live? Westminster?

So how does a young person without a driving licence/no means to run a car, get a job involving shifts/night work?

So if these women cannot pick up their children because they are at work, who does?

You'll have to tell us all about these companies offering Plumbing and Electrician apprenticeships?

Because they are not.

Anyway, for you doom mongers out there:

A majority of UK businesses expect a positive start to 2025, according to two economic confidence surveys which show managers planning for growth after a challenging period for the economy
About 70% of UK businesses expect their turnover to increase over the next year, up from 62% in December 2023. Meanwhile, 73% are confident of greater profitability, according to research from Lloyds bank

Hann-Ju Ho, a senior economist at Lloyds, said:* *“It is exciting to see that businesses have ambitious plans for next year and are confident of growth. Overall, businesses have responded well to the changing external environment. While the economic outlook has been challenging, the steps firms are taking to grow should put them in a strong position for success in 2025

So capitalism does does propaganda for itself to boost share prices and people believe it? Madness.
I am truly shocked, though, by how vile and reactionary many people on here are....and deluded. All train as plumbers. Don't do anything you might like and be good at...just make that your hobby! Shut down the useless universities. Teach HNDs (errr who does that if there is no training because there are no universities??) We've had the dog whistle words about woke and pointless degrees and stupid children (other people's children) or shall we call them drones who should be taking low wage jobs (God forbid they might unionise and improve working conditions). I remember before Brexit when Guardian comments were flooded by targeted right wing attempts to shift mood. I'll bet a fair amount on Reform or Musk or someone else doing that here....because this is not what I encounter in daily life from a vast variety of people across social spectrum. They love and support their children's desires...they have a modicum of interest in people's self realization.

This is a classic case of some people being solutions people whilst others are problems people. All of these are solvable.

They will be solvable for some but not for most & will only be so, if there is supportive family and dependent on where you live.

As always, the privileged have no clue or solutions.

To be fair I live near major distribution hubs and see people catching buses at 9 o’clock at night for Work riding bicycles through the area 7 am obviously coming home.
Nothing is impossible. I wouldn’t want my kids doing it of course not but then I did it so that my kids don’t have to.

That’s how social mobility is supposed to work

Absolute tripe. People are sold the lie that going to university opens doors to a good life. That’s not the fault of young people. And people have every right to choose their own career path.

Not everyone is prepared to be a wage slave. But you carry on

Warehouse jobs need no degree and plenty of good promotion prospects once you are in.

Just a supervisor job pays 33k. Management over 40k. But people turn their nose up at the logistics sector. Ds works in it and he is one of the few white British staff. It wd seem the working immigrants are less fussy!

Well done to your DS for not turning his nose up at this line of work. He's getting out there and earning a wage and more importantly gaining work experience.

DS is using his part time job in waste management to move into teaching eventually. But similar to your DS he needs work experience and at 17 will stand out because he's not being snobby about what work is out there. His CV will look very good because he applied himself. He isn't looking for handouts.