Bloomberg reports that the UK labour market is facing a clear generational gap, with the number of employed people aged 65 and over rising to a record high of more than 1.7 million earlier this year, while nearly 1 million people aged 16 to 24 are not working, not studying and not in training, known as the NEET group, and the youth unemployment rate is close to its highest in more than a decade. The ratio of young workers to employed people aged 65 and over has fallen from 10 to 1 in the early 2000s to just 2 to 1 today. The trend is driven by longer life expectancy, better health, flexible working patterns and cost-of-living pressures that have led some Baby Boomers to keep working, amid what the Bank of England calls a Low Hire, Low Fire environment that limits new job openings. Data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that only about half of people aged 16 to 24 are currently employed, down more than 4 percentage points from 2022, while data from Indeed shows that the share of entry-level graduate positions relative to total job vacancies has halved since 2022. Ben Harrison, director of the Work Foundation at Lancaster University, believes AI may help extend the working lives of older workers, but for young people the technology could be a direct threat to their employment prospects. Meanwhile, many UK companies are increasingly focusing on older workers, such as Veolia, which has a dedicated recruitment page for people over 50, AXA, which runs retraining and skills development programmes, and Dentsu, which has launched an internship programme aimed at applicants aged 50 and over.
Dentsu Group Inc.
AXA SA
Veolia Environnement VE SA