The Milburn Report landed this week. Before I share what we are seeing on the ground, the numbers deserve to be stated plainly.
- Over 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 are now classified as NEET. The highest level in 12 years.
- At the turn of the century, 63% of young people were in work. Today it is barely 50%. Over the same period, the employment rate for 25 to 64 year olds rose from 74% to 80%.
- Youth unemployment has risen from 9.2% in mid-2022 to 15.8% today.
- Six in ten young people currently NEET have never had a job. In 2005 that figure was four in ten.
- The government spends 25 times more on welfare for 16 to 24 year olds than it does on helping them find work.
- The cost to the UK economy is estimated at £125bn a year.
These are not statistics to skim past. They represent real people, real communities, and a structural failure that has been compounding for decades. Alan Milburn is right to call it what it is.
But I want to challenge one conclusion that tends to follow from reports like this. The suggestion, rarely stated directly but frequently implied, that this generation is somehow less willing, less driven, or less capable than those who came before. That framing is not just wrong. It is itself an act of laziness.
What We Are Actually Seeing
At Corecom Tech Academy, our early careers programme is deliberately broad. We work with career changers, returning parents, ex-military personnel, and people at various life stages. That breadth is intentional and something we are proud of.
But young people naturally make up a significant proportion of our associates. And since 2022 we have seen over 50% year-on-year growth in early careers opportunities placed with our clients.
We are also receiving record numbers of applications from young people wanting a place on our training academies. The demand is real, the motivation is real, and the quality of people coming through our door is exceptional.
What has narrowed is not ambition. It is the supply of accessible, structured entry points into meaningful employment. That is a systems problem. Not a generation problem.
Our Clients Are Not the Barrier
One of the most consistent things we hear from the technology leaders we work with is that supporting the development of the next generation is one of the primary reasons they engage with us.
We are not convincing CIOs and CTOs to give early careers a chance. The appetite is there. These are leaders who understand the long-term argument and want to be part of the solution.
And the associates they take on are not observers. They are working on business-critical programmes, in regulated industries, on high-profile initiatives, delivering real outcomes from day one. Quite frankly, they are flying.
The AI Paradox Nobody Is Talking About Honestly
Here is where I think the conversation needs to go further than the Milburn Report takes it.
Boards and shareholders are demanding results from AI investment. CIOs and CTOs are under significant pressure to make it a cornerstone of their strategies. And the first roles being sacrificed in that process are junior tech roles, where manual and process-heavy work is most easily automated.
On the surface, that might look like efficiency. In practice, it is a strategic error.
AI tools do not adopt themselves. They need people inside the business who understand how to work with them, embed them into delivery workflows, challenge them, iterate on them, and build on them over time. That operational layer is not a nice-to-have. It is what makes AI adoption stick across a function. And it is exactly what disappears when you stop hiring junior technologists.
The irony is striking. The roles being cut to make way for AI are the very roles organisations need to make AI work. What we hear constantly from technology leaders is that the operational capability to drive adoption is missing. And yet the pipeline that would build it is being quietly closed off.
At Corecom Tech Academy we run dedicated AI Enablement Academies built around each client’s specific AI environment and delivery context. Associates are not arriving to observe or to be eased in gently. They are coming in to do real work: identifying automation opportunities, integrating AI tooling into live workflows, supporting the rollout of AI-assisted delivery across teams, and building the kind of hands-on operational knowledge that makes adoption sustainable rather than superficial. After a 12-week bespoke academy, these people will be more skilled in AI than 90% of the workforce they are walking into. They are chosen by the client, trained on the client’s stack, and productive from day one. Not contractors who leave when the project ends. Not a generic cohort trained on the wrong tools. People who grow into permanent headcount and carry that institutional knowledge forward.
That is the gap a lost generation of junior tech workers leaves behind. And it is a gap that compounds every year it goes unfilled.
What Would Actually Help
To businesses: the most effective organisations we work with do not rely on a single route into early careers. They run apprenticeships, graduate programmes, and community partnerships alongside structured deployment models like ours, each complementing the others and collectively widening the number of entry points available to young people. If early careers is genuinely a strategic priority, build it like one. Multiple pathways, sustained investment, and clarity on what you are trying to achieve.
To government: release the funding. There are millions sitting in local government and DfE budgets that could be flowing to businesses and education providers right now, creating structured tech opportunities for young people. The complexity and bureaucracy around accessing that funding is a barrier in itself. Simplify it, untie it, and let it work.7
A Final Thought
The Milburn Report is a serious piece of work and it deserves a serious response. But the answer to the numbers it presents is not resignation, and it is certainly not writing off a generation.
We are not seeing disengagement. We are seeing a door that keeps getting narrower, and a generation of young people pushing hard against it.
It is time to open it back up.
Written by Rick Hughes, Director & Co-Founder at Corecom Tech Academy.
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