Nearly One in Six Young People Can’t Find Work. We’ve Known This Was Coming.
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LEAP FORWARD PODCAST · EPISODE INSIGHT
This week’s ONS figures confirmed what Lord Jim Knight told us on The Leap Forward months ago. The question now isn’t whether the system is broken. It’s what we do next.
On Tuesday 17 February 2026, the Office for National Statistics published figures that should have stopped people mid-scroll.
Youth unemployment in the UK has hit 16.1% — the highest level since 2014, higher even than during the pandemic. Nearly one in six young people who want to work cannot find a job. The Resolution Foundation noted that for the first time since records began in 2000, the UK’s youth unemployment rate now exceeds the EU average. Entry-level vacancies — the graduate schemes, junior roles, and apprenticeships that once served as the first rung of a career — have dropped 32% since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, according to data reported by The Guardian.
These are not abstract numbers. They are the statistical shadow of what Lord Jim Knight described when he sat down with us on The Leap Forward. A system, as he put it, where the promise that had been made to young people is simply “falling apart.”
"The promise of study hard, do well in your tests, get to a great university, you’ll then get a great job — is just falling apart. And we’ve got to do better." — Lord Jim Knight, The Leap Forward Podcast
Jim knows this not as an abstraction but as something he has encountered in real conversations. He described meeting a young man who attended his local comprehensive in southeast London, earned a place at Oxford, did well, graduated with an English degree — and cannot get a job. His applications disappear into algorithmic screening systems that never send a reply. Jim has also taken on a Cambridge history graduate with a first-class degree who is now doing a master’s at LSE and still cannot find work. He is giving her experience in his Parliamentary office so she has something to show employers.
This is a former Minister for Schools and a current legislator finding workarounds for a system he helped design. That tells you something.
The ladder has been quietly removed
The collapse in entry-level roles is not a story about lazy graduates or unrealistic expectations. It is a structural shift accelerating since 2022 and only now showing up in headline unemployment figures in a way that is impossible to ignore.
The Big Four accountancy firms — among the most reliable graduate employers in the UK — have been pulling back sharply. According to The Telegraph, KPMG reduced its graduate cohort by 29% between 2023 and 2024. Deloitte cut by 18%. EY and PwC followed. The PwC chief executive told The Times directly that they were “hiring fewer graduates this year” and that AI-exposed occupations were growing more slowly than others. The Centre for Social Justice found that 707,000 graduates are currently out of work and claiming benefits — up 46% since 2019.
The reason given, consistently, is the same. AI is absorbing the work that junior employees used to do. Basic research, document summarisation, compliance checks, data entry, content drafting. The tasks that once gave graduates their first foothold — and crucially taught them how organisations actually function — are now handled by software.
Jim frames this with uncomfortable clarity. Employers are not acting irrationally. They are responding to a genuine economic logic.
"Individual employers are rationally saying: ‘Well, I can use a machine to do what that entry-level job does.’ But they will realise very quickly, if they’re not doing so already, that they’re still going to have to hire some people to manage the machines." — Lord Jim Knight, The Leap Forward Podcast
The problem is what gets lost in that transition. The repetitive, low-stakes tasks of a junior role are where young people learn the discipline, communication, accountability, and professional judgment that prepare them for greater responsibility. Remove the rung and you do not just create unemployment. You break the pipeline that feeds every senior role in every organisation. As one analysis recently put it, if firms let AI handle the work that once justified large graduate intakes, where does the next generation of partners and principals come from?
A credential that no longer tells the story
The deeper problem Jim identifies is not just that entry-level jobs are disappearing. It is that the tools we use to communicate what a young person can do have never been adequate — and in a market this competitive, their inadequacy has become critical.
Universities awarded 122,410 first-class honours degrees in the UK in 2023 alone. When Cambridge cannot differentiate between the hundreds of candidates arriving with A-stars at A-level, and employers cannot distinguish between first-class graduates from the same institution, a paper certificate with a grade on it has run out of things to say.
"Wouldn’t it be better if we had a digital portfolio for them, where they could drill into how a child’s done within those exams and with other things — the other achievements made on the sports field, in the theatre, in the concert hall — so they can get a more rounded picture? That same portfolio could also be used by employers to interrogate whether or not that person is likely to be a successful employee, with the potential to develop." — Lord Jim Knight, The Leap Forward Podcast
This is not a marginal idea. It is a fundamental rethinking of what a qualification is for. Jim’s argument is that we need to move from a system that measures memory recall — exams done in sports halls, as he puts it — to one that captures the whole person. Project-based qualifications. Evidence of applied thinking. The kind of portfolio that lets an employer understand not just what someone achieved, but whether they have the potential to grow.
AI tools, he argues, can help with exactly this — interrogating rich portfolios of achievement to surface the signal that flat transcripts bury. The technology exists. The question is whether institutions are willing to redesign themselves around it.
The same failure repeats inside every organisation
If you lead an L&D function, manage a training budget, or run a workforce that needs to acquire complex technical skills, this is not someone else’s story.
The gap Jim describes between education and employment — between what the system produces and what the world of work actually needs — does not end at graduation. It reproduces itself inside organisations constantly. Employees complete mandatory training. They pass the assessment. They return to their roles. And within weeks, the behaviour has reverted.
The learning science on this is unambiguous. 50% of new information is forgotten within an hour. 70% within 24 hours. Training built around content delivery is not built around how human beings actually learn. It is built around compliance, measurability, and the ability to say a box has been ticked.
Jim’s framing for education applies with equal force to workplace learning. The system is obsessed with qualification outcomes. The world of work is obsessed with job outcomes. And the two do not necessarily meet.
"One is obsessed by qualification outcomes, the other is obsessed by job outcomes, and the two don’t necessarily meet — because qualifications don’t necessarily give you a job. You’ve got to fundamentally question what we’re doing if we haven’t joined the dots. Because that just disrupts people’s lives." — Lord Jim Knight, The Leap Forward Podcast
Real competence — the kind that holds under pressure, that transfers from training environment to live situation, that changes what someone actually does when the stakes are real — requires something different from content delivery. It requires practice, repetition, and feedback in conditions that mirror reality closely enough to build genuine confidence. It requires the opportunity to make mistakes safely and develop the muscle memory that only comes from doing, not watching.
This is why the organisations pulling ahead in automotive, aviation, and technical training are the ones investing in simulation-based learning and scenario-based practice. Not because it is fashionable. Because it is the only method that closes the gap between knowing and doing at scale.
What it means to reform a system that resists change
Jim is candid about how hard institutional change is. His time as Schools Minister under Tony Blair — the era of “education, education, education” and a target of 50% going to university — is something he reflects on with honesty.
"To an extent, I’m part of the problem of fixating on that mindset." — Lord Jim Knight, The Leap Forward Podcast
That kind of self-awareness is unusual in policy conversations. And it points to something important: the reforms needed are not technical. They are cultural. The school system works well, as Jim observes, for those heading to academic universities. It fails almost everyone else. And changing that requires not just new policy but a different idea of what school is fundamentally for.
"We need to have a mindset in education that’s not that school exists in order to filter for universities, but school exists in order to prepare every young person to be a productive and engaged and valued member of society." — Lord Jim Knight, The Leap Forward Podcast
He points to the United States, where a generation of young people who have the grades for college are choosing vocational routes instead — what some are calling the ‘tool belt generation’. They are making a rational calculation in a country where graduate unemployment has risen above the national average. Applied, skilled work pays well, carries community respect, and does not begin with four years of debt. The UK is not far behind in needing to make that same reckoning.
From Parliament to the classroom — what is actually working
None of this is cause for despair. Jim has spent his career not just critiquing systems but working inside them to build something better, and the organisations he leads are working evidence that the alternative exists.
The multi-academy trust he chairs serves 25,000 young people in some of England’s most disadvantaged communities. Century Tech, which he leads, uses AI to personalise learning at scale across thousands of classrooms — moving beyond the one-size-fits-all model that the current system imposes. STEM Learning is transforming how science teachers are trained across the UK. These are not pilots or experiments. They are institutions in operation, making a measurable difference.
His argument, made quietly but with evident conviction, is that the technology to redesign learning now exists in a way that it simply did not before. AI can personalise at a scale no individual teacher ever could. Simulation environments can build applied competence that classrooms have never been able to develop. Digital portfolios can communicate what a person can actually do in ways that transcend the blunt instrument of a degree classification.
The ONS figures published this week will generate political responses. The government has pledged £1.5 billion to tackle youth unemployment and announced plans for 50,000 new apprenticeships. These are not nothing. But Jim’s conversation points toward something more fundamental than investment levels — a rethinking of what learning is designed to produce, and for whom.
The constraint, as always, is not capability. It is will. Whether institutions are willing to move at the speed the situation now demands.
The numbers published on Tuesday suggest the situation has stopped waiting.
Listen to the full conversation
Lord Jim Knight’s full episode is available now on The Leap Forward. The conversation covers digital credentials, AI in personalised learning, what reform actually looks like from the inside of government, and the specific changes he believes are needed — urgently — from universities, employers, and policymakers alike.
By the numbers
16.1% youth unemployment in the UK — highest since 2014, now above the EU average (ONS, Feb 2026)
32% drop in UK entry-level vacancies since ChatGPT launched in November 2022 (Guardian / Adzuna)
707,000 graduates currently out of work and claiming benefits — up 46% since 2019 (Centre for Social Justice)
29% reduction in KPMG’s graduate intake in one year; Deloitte cut by 18%, PwC by 6% (The Telegraph / The Times)
50% of new learning forgotten within one hour without reinforcement (learning science research consensus)
About The Leap Forward
The Leap Forward is Bridge Learning Tech’s podcast featuring conversations with the leaders, thinkers, and practitioners reshaping the future of work and learning. New episodes every Wednesday.
Hosted by Vlad Shishkaryov, Founder & CEO of Bridge Learning Technologies — building AI-powered simulations, technical training, and custom academies for automotive, aviation, and compliance organisations across the UK and USA.
