By Giles Smith, CEO of Mediazoo Group
Last week I attended an event where some industry leaders argued against hiring young people. I found that hard to understand, given the talent and potential we have seen through our own graduate programme. It also felt like a return to 2014, when youth unemployment hit 20%. At that time, redundancy rates were higher, there was no apprenticeship levy, and a third of those affected entered higher education.
This issue is deeply personal to me. I have two children at this stage of their journey, and I have always believed we have a responsibility to support the economy’s long-term success and create greater opportunity for our families and communities.
Added to this, yesterday the BBC reported that Next is now receiving 19 applicants for every shop floor vacancy. That is up from 10 just two years ago. Lord Wolfson, the Head of Next, called it "indicative of just how big the crisis is in youth unemployment at the moment." The headline unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds now sits at 16.2%, the highest since 2014, and more than three times the general rate. At Mediazoo Group, we're seeing it too with our own junior vacancies now attracting 100+ applicants.
The debate that followed focused, predictably, on National Insurance, minimum wage, and the Employment Rights Act. These are real pressures and the policy conversation matters. But I think we're at risk of arguing about the symptoms while the underlying condition gets worse.
This isn't just a cost problem for employers, or a growth problem for the economy. It's a signal that the entire system we've built to move people from education into meaningful work is no longer fit for the world young people are entering.
Alan Milburn's review into youth inactivity, the first part of which is published this week, puts a number on that failure. For every £25 the government spends keeping young people on benefits, it spends just £1 helping them into work. Milburn called it "shameful."
It's currently a political choice, and one we urgently need to reverse.
Nearly a million young people in the UK are currently not in work, education or training. But behind that number is something harder to quantify: a generation entering adult life without a plan. Not just fewer jobs, but genuine uncertainty about what work looks like, what skills will matter, and whether the path from education to career exists in the way it once did. That level of uncertainty isn't just an economic challenge. For young people, it's a deeply personal one. The response so far has largely been to manage the cost rather than address the cause. The real question isn't what the reports say, but what we do next.
I believe the answer starts with a genuine commitment to bringing young people in, not as a gesture, but because their perspective, energy and instincts are exactly what modern organisations need. At Mediazoo Group, our graduate programme, placement years and work experience have consistently shown us that junior talent doesn't just fill gaps; it challenges assumptions, brings fresh thinking and keeps us honest about the world we're actually operating in. We're committed to doing more of it.
We talk a lot about AI disrupting jobs. But the deeper disruption is subtler: organisations themselves no longer know what they're supposed to look like. And if organisations are uncertain about their own future, imagine what that means for a young person trying to build a career inside one. AI isn't just automating tasks, it's exposing the structural assumptions baked into how we organise, lead and develop people. This isn't just a talent problem. It's an organisational design problem. The organisations that will thrive aren't those that automate fastest. They're those that can redesign themselves with people at the centre. That's what human performance means: not optimising individuals in isolation, but building organisations genuinely fit for an AI-shaped future.
That means organisations urgently need to rethink what talent means. We currently hire for credentials, develop for current roles, and measure against today's KPIs. It's a model built for a stable world, but we don't live in one anymore. The capabilities that genuinely differentiate high performers in conditions of complexity and change often have nothing to do with what the job spec asked for. What are we actually hiring for? What does development mean when the role may look completely different in three years? The next generation deserves an entry point that prepares them for that reality, not the reality of 1995.
One of the most critical future capabilities is creativity. Creativity is not just a niche skill belonging to designers and artists, but is the ability to form new connections, challenge existing assumptions, and generate responses to problems that don't yet have established answers. Problem-solving under uncertainty. Strategic thinking when the map keeps changing. The capacity to innovate not just as a moment, but as a habit. These are learnable skills, and that's the part the market hasn't fully grasped.
The policy window for all of this is opening right now. The conversation about education- to-work transition is moving from specialist concern to mainstream urgency, and organisations that step into this space with a clear, credible position, rather than waiting for consensus, will shape what comes next.
Mediazoo Group has always believed that how you develop people tells you everything about what you believe about them.
I'd welcome the conversation. What are you seeing in your organisations? Where is the current model failing the people coming through?