🏛️ Youth-Led Fairer Career Support through Cross-Sector Action

The Problem
Young people often face a confusing, unfair, and demotivating path when transitioning from education to employment. Careers advice can be inconsistent, impersonal, or outdated. Work experience placements are short, poorly supported, and rarely meaningful. And yet, young people’s voices are almost entirely missing from the systems meant to guide them.

The Vision
We propose a new model for careers support and work experience:
Youth-led, data-informed, and co-designed with schools, employers, and local government.

This means giving young people a real role in shaping the pathways, partnerships, and systems that affect them — and ensuring those systems are accountable, inclusive, and adaptive.

Key Actions

1. Youth Participation & Data Gathering

   • Involve young people in designing and evaluating career programmes and work placements

   • Support youth-led initiatives to collect, analyse, and share data on what works

   • Recognise youth as experts in their own experiences and essential contributors to career system reform

2. Cross-Sector Partnerships for Quality Work Experience

   • Establish partnerships between schools, local employers, unions, charities, and councils

   • Incentivise businesses to provide placements by offering insurance coverage, recognition schemes, or tax relief

   • Support longer-term, recurring placements starting from Year 9, with options for earlier exposure from Year 6–7

3. Modernise and Standardise Career Guidance

   • Create a national framework for careers support with clear expectations and room for local adaptation

   • Retrain and accredit career advisors so they can provide one-on-one support and culturally sensitive guidance

   • Ensure advisors have access to real-time, local data on work opportunities and skills in demand

4. Build a Shared Digital Infrastructure

   • Develop participatory platforms where youth can match with placements, earn certifications, and reflect on their experience

   • Ensure accessibility across devices, languages, and needs

   • Let employers share offers and get guidance on inclusive and meaningful placements

Why this matters
When youth are treated as passive recipients of career advice, the result is frustration and exclusion.
This proposal reframes them as designers, evaluators, and partners, using their insights to shape a more just, connected, and inspiring career support system.

If we want every young person to have a fair shot at a fulfilling future, we need to listen, equip, and involve them — from the start.

Clarifications & Amendments (from the forum):

• ✅ Transferable skills and workplace literacy (e.g., jargon, norms, expectations) must be a core goal of placements. That’s how young people can benefit even if they change sectors later.

• Can local governments afford this? Not alone — funding should be national but strategically decentralised, ensuring core budgets reach local actors to implement effectively.

• Nationally-set framework, regionally adapted: A dual-level structure is key. National bodies should define standards, but local networks must adapt them to realities on the ground.

• Standardisation through clear guidance: Create a common language and set of criteria for placements (rights, outcomes, mentorship, etc.), backed by employer toolkits.

• 🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏻 Who brings people together? A publicly funded coordinating entity or regional hub should be tasked with convening employers, educators, and youth — co-design is essential.

• 💻 Digital platforms should be engaging, certifying, and accessible — like a LinkedIn for youth experience. They can reduce barriers and allow cross-sector collaboration.

• Equitable distribution of funds: Spread resources across education, youth services, and small business support, ensuring long-term use and inter-institutional collaboration.

Expected outcomes:

• Improved equity in access to job-related learning

• Higher quality of placements and advice

• Empowered young people with better tools and knowledge

• Reduced employer barriers and stronger community links

• A more just and future-oriented pathway to employment