I once watched Fight Club with a friend who was bewildered by the idea that, in the 1990s, the idea of having a job where you worked in a cubicle was something terrible. This is how bleak the current jobs market is for graduates.
Recent Office for National Statistics figures show that while the core rate of unemployment is 5.2%, for 16- to 24-year-olds it’s 16.1% – which comes as no surprise to any of us.
We’ve all seen the countless testimonials about how nowadays you’re lucky even to get a rejection letter – and that’s after going through seven rounds of personality tests, recorded videos, written tasks and assessments. In 2025, 1.2 million graduates competed for just 17,000 open roles.
In October of that same year, the Telegraph published an article titled “Six ways Gen Z are ruining the workplace”, where we are accused of being too anxious to answer the phone, too emotionally fragile to handle deadlines, and too obsessed with “safe spaces” to just get on with the job. The stereotype is clear: we’re all workshy snowflakes.
To that I say – go to any cocktail bar in a relatively large UK city, and you’ll find Gen Z women dressed as if they’ve just left the office. But they haven’t. Like the children who wear Barcelona football kits and aspire to be Lionel Messi, they too are chasing a dream: the dream of filling out spreadsheets while wearing a nice blazer.
There is much social and economic angst about the nearly one million 16- to 24-year-olds who are Neet (not in education, employment, or training). But do we ever stop to consider how depressing it is that we’ve reached a point where living a corporate life feels like an exotic fantasy?
The dream is no longer to be the boss, it’s to be the intern. Not to own our own homes, but to move out of mum and dad’s box room into a flatshare.
The worst accusation levelled by the 70% of managers who say they are struggling with younger staff is that workers in their 20s harbour “unrealistic expectations”. Pretty much everyone I know who is unemployed in their 20s has had to lower their (already modest) expectations many times. Even then, companies somehow find new ways to disappoint.
Oliver, 26, has been applying for work consistently since he graduated from university and describes the search for a starter job as “one big humiliation ritual. I’ve applied for literally hundreds of roles, from a supermarket area manager to a prison officer. I couldn’t have cast my net wider.”
On one occasion, he drove 250 miles to an assessment centre, paying for his own petrol and accommodation, but was immediately dismissed by interviewers for forgetting a pen.
“This type of narrative [that young people don’t want to work] makes me furious because I and so many people I know are trying so hard. We are treating looking for a job almost as if it is a job itself, and I feel like I’m screaming into a void. It shouldn’t be this hard.”
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Jonathan Townsend, UK chief executive of The King’s Trust, which helps young people to find work, told the Guardian: “More young people are coming to us eager to work but feeling locked out of opportunities… this generation has faced a uniquely difficult start to working life.”
The number of starter jobs has fallen by nearly a third since 2022 – coincidentally the same year ChatGPT was launched. “Why don’t all the boomers just retire already and free up the job chain so we can actually get on the career ladder?” is a sentiment I’ve heard expressed by many friends frustrated by their fruitless searches. And I’m inclined to agree. Except, isn’t there maybe a bit of a chicken and egg situation going on here?
The longer under-30s stay unemployed (or on the minimum wage or no-wage internships), the longer the Bank of Mum and Dad has to stay open. And the longer that stays open, the longer parents who may have planned to retire at 65 have to keep working to cover their kids’ ever-rocketing rents.
Youth unemployment isn’t just an issue affecting Gen Z. It destabilises the entire country. With fewer of us earning, fewer of us are spending. With fewer taxes paid, public services suffer. And with more 30-year-olds moving back into the loft, there’s more resentment all round and far less chance of grandkids. Who wants to get jiggy when they can hear their parents watching MasterChef in the next room?
So before lecturing us about phone etiquette or how back in your day you just “took a little initiative” and printed out your CV, a little perspective might help. We don’t want six-figure salaries or corner offices: we want a starter job. We want someone to reply to our emails. We want the chance to be tired from work, not tired from looking for it.
Lucy Reade is a New World journalist
