No snakes, but no ladders: Young people, employment, and the low skills trap at the bottom of the contemporary service economy

In recent years, research and policy activity has primarily been concerned with the numbers, experiences

and trajectories of apprentices and university students, or with the lives of ‘spectacular’, more obviously

economically marginalised groups of young people who are entrenched in issues of social exclusion and

deprivation. Many young people with level two and level three qualifications, however, directly enter the

labour market. This sizeable but unspectacular group remains overlooked by policymakers as well as

researchers. These young people undertake new forms of employment in an increasingly polarized job

market, rely on on-the-job training rather than higher education to enhance their human capital and

compete more and more with graduates who cannot find jobs to match their own newly acquired high

skill levels.

The net result is that this middling group ends up becoming trapped, with limited chances of progression,

for example in the retail sector where 31 percent of employees are aged 16 to 24. The ongoing policy

focus on level 2 qualifications does not serve these young people well. Policy-makers use qualification

levels as a proxy for skills, but disregard the negative returns and by extension the lack of genuine

progression as a result of obtaining such qualifications. Achieving a qualification – any qualification – it

seems has become a proxy measure of successful outcomes over and above what people actually do in

their jobs, what they are actually paid, what they can afford, or whether they have genuinely improved

their capacity to be more productive. Greater employee engagement in company training and

development programmes can better align business needs with individual needs for progression. At the

policy level, skills policy needs to place greater emphasis on whether achieving a qualification enables

employees to perform better and progress.