This photograph of me and Andy Burnham was taken at a digital inclusion conference in Manchester.
Andy is one of the few senior leaders (and now PM of course!) I know who will deliver a keynote and then stay for the whole day. He listens to the other speakers, speaks to people in the room and properly engages with the subject. He doesn’t give his speech, pose for a photograph and disappear.
A chance conversation at that conference led to support for a Digital Academy my brilliant team and I delivered when at LBG. Had I not been in that room and met the people I did, it might never have happened.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading Andy’s call for people in senior positions to let a young person shadow them at work, particularly young people without family connections or professional networks.
He’s right.
So much of my own life has been shaped by the people I happened to meet.
When I was 12, I approached an owner of a coach company and asked him for free tickets for me and my nana. That conversation eventually led to him offering me a job when I was 16.
There was the first teacher I met at 16 who made me believe I had a brain.
Then a local business owner came into my school to tell us about his work at a marketing agency. He offered to help so I asked whether I could spend a week working with him for free because I wanted to understand what the job was really like. He said yes, and that helped me get started on my first application to Boots head office.
Later, Keith Jones, my MD at PC World gave me the opportunity to change careers entirely.
None of those moments started with an online application. Nobody put an algorithm over the top of my life and decided whether I had enough of the right keywords to deserve a conversation.
I met someone. We spoke. They saw something in me and gave me a chance.
How many young people are missing those moments now?
The latest Office for National Statistics figures estimate that youth NEET has risen from 13% in 2019 to 15% in 2025, meaning almost 900,000 young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training. More concerning, long-term youth unemployment (over 6 months) is now at its highest level since 2014, with 2.2% of young people in that category.
I don’t particularly like reducing a million individual lives to the acronym “NEET”. Behind that label are young people with personalities, interests, ideas, difficult experiences, untapped skills and, in many cases, no idea how to get through the first door.
Graduates aren’t necessarily faring much better.
Graduate job vacancies fell by 14.6% in 2024 and are now at their lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis, according to research from HEPI and Universities UK reported by the Higher Education Policy Institute. The ratio tells the story: 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 UK graduate roles.
Summer jobs, which used to give young people some of their first workplace experience, are at a four-year low.
Meanwhile, the average higher-education loan balance for someone entering repayment in England is now £47,730, according to the Student Loans Company.
We have young people leaving university with talent, ambition and nearly £50,000 of student debt, only to find fewer graduate jobs and employers still asking for experience they haven’t been allowed to gain.
How is that supposed to work?
I’m also becoming a little tired of hearing some larger organisations explain why offering work experience is too complicated or offering work experience to a limited number of people that still have to apply following a formal process which some children don’t know about or don’t have the confidence to apply
Yes, there are genuine issues to manage around safeguarding, insurance, employment rights, accessibility and modern slavery. Nobody is suggesting that young people should replace paid employees or spend months providing free labour.
But these are organisations that manage multinational supply chains, enormous technology programmes and incredibly complicated regulatory requirements. Are we really saying that arranging one properly structured day of work shadowing is beyond them or limited to only a few when many of the organisations employ thousands of people.
I thought it was complicated too but on a Andy Burnham discussion forum GOV.UK guidance already explains the difference between genuine work shadowing, where somebody observes and learns, and work that may create an entitlement to the minimum wage.
Could a young person sit in on a few meetings, meet colleagues doing different jobs, ask questions and see how an organisation works?
Could the employer cover their travel and lunch so the opportunity isn’t limited to families who can afford it?
Could senior leaders give one day a year?
I know it can be done because smaller organisations are already doing it without large HR, legal and early-careers teams behind them.
There is another problem developing through the use of AI in recruitment.
A young person uses AI to write their application. An employer then places an algorithm over that application to score whether they sound suitable. The young person’s actual life, everything they’ve learned, overcome, created or contributed—is reduced to whatever the systems recognise.
If we want to use technology, surely we can use it in a more imaginative way?
This is why I believe Startingpoint could be genuinely game-changing.
Startingpoint gives young people somewhere to build an evidence-based profile of who they are. They can show their skills, talents, motivation, creativity, interests and potential rather than hoping a conventional CV somehow communicates their personality.
A young person might not have a formal job title to list. They may, however, have cared for a family member, organised something in their community, taught themselves a technical skill, captained a sports team, volunteered, created content or overcome barriers that required more resilience than many adults will ever need.
Why wouldn’t we want to see that evidence?
Why are we using technology to filter out personality when we could use it to help young people evidence it?
The Startingpoint platform also allows employers and education providers to connect young people with work experience, apprenticeships and employment opportunities. I know the team are continuing to update the technology and make it more accessible, as any new platform should. Something designed to widen opportunity must work for disabled and digitally excluded young people too.
AI can deliver speed and precision, but it cannot replicate the creativity, judgement, empathy and lived experience that shape human decision-making. As highlighted by experts in Forbes’ High-Demand Human Skills in the Ongoing Age of AI, these uniquely human capabilities are becoming more – not less – valuable as AI becomes embedded in our work.
I use AI and I’m enthusiastic about its potential. But we’re getting it the wrong way round if we use it to make young people sound identical and then use another piece of technology to reject them before anybody has spoken to them.
Life is about who you meet.
It was true for me at 12. It was true when I met the teacher who believed in me, the chap from the coach company, the person from the marketing agency, Keith Jones, Nick Williams, Andy Burnham and the people who later supported our Digital Academy which has gone onto train over a million people – for free
Young people need more chances to meet people who might see something in them.
So what could us all, employers, schools, technology companies and those of us with decent networks do to make that much simpler?
Could every senior leader offer one day of work shadowing?
Could every large employer publish a small number of accessible opportunities through a platform such as Startingpoint?
Could we ask young people to show us who they are before an algorithm decides who they might be?
And, most importantly, could we start by having a proper conversation with them?
