A improved method is under way in how British companies find and prepare early talent. The week of ‘shadowing’ that has defined school work experience for decades is giving way to programmes built on repeated contact, structured skills sessions and direct preparation for recruitment.

Research shows that repeated, meaningful engagement with employers during school reduces the risk of a young person becoming not in education, employment or training by 80%, a return few interventions of comparable cost can claim. Frequency, not duration, appears to be the variable that matters.

Evidence submitted to Parliament’s Work and Pensions Committee estimates that bringing the NEET rate down to 5% could add £69 billion to UK GDP, while the Milburn review puts the current cumulative annual cost of almost one million disengaged young people at £125 billion, exceeding annual education spending. Youth disengagement has moved from a social concern to a constraint on national output.

Turning exposure into experience

Structured programmes now run over months instead of days, combining workplace visits, careers sessions, practical skills work and guidance on CVs, interviews and applications. Confidence builds through repetition, and a young person who has met an employer four times arrives at an interview with something to discuss and a reference point for what the work involves.

One of the country’s largest grocers, Sainsbury’s will create around 10,000 work experience and employability opportunities from October across England, Scotland and Wales, while National Grid has put £5 million behind a programme supporting 5,000 young people into work. Both are delivered through named partners with defined age pathways instead of being run informally through individual sites.

Sector breadth marks a further departure. Participants in the retail programme will see careers across retail, logistics, food, technology and business, which reframes what a familiar consumer brand actually employs people to do. A grocer is also a supply chain operator, a technology employer and a manufacturer, and making that visible early widens the pool of candidates who consider the industry at all.

“For too long work experience has been treated as an afterthought. Yet 6 in 10 young people who are NEET have never had a job. Employers say lack of experience is the single biggest barrier to hiring young people, and young people say exactly the same. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s holding Britain back.“

Alan Milburn

The practical consequence is a market failure that companies are better placed to correct than any public programme. Experience cannot be acquired without an employer, and employers screen for experience, which leaves capable candidates outside the process entirely. Businesses that manufacture the experience themselves convert a blocked pipeline into a recruitment channel they own outright.

Retail illustrates the point at volume, having long served as the first employer for large numbers of school leavers who go on to work across the wider economy.

As the largest private sector employer, retail is a first step on the career ladder for thousands of people every year, building confidence, skills and experience that shapes their futures.

Helen Dickinson Chief Executive British Retail Consortium

The cost of leaving talent behind

The labour market arithmetic explains why interest has sharpened. Over one million people aged 16 to 24 sit outside education, employment or training, around one in eight, with the Office for National Statistics recording 1,012,000 between January and March 2026 and the rate reaching 13.5% at the start of the year. Roughly 60% of the group is economically inactive rather than actively job hunting, meaning the workforce these companies will recruit from over the next decade is smaller than the population suggests.

The cost lands on both sides of the ledger. Analysis from Impetus puts the annual GDP loss from the post-pandemic rise at £27 billion and the lifetime cost to the state of each additional disengaged young person at £244,000, while the Milburn review identifies £8.1 billion in annual benefits spending linked to young people. Public expenditure of that magnitude eventually reappears as tax, which gives every profitable business a direct financial interest in the trend reversing.

Entry-level hiring itself has been under pressure, with growth in early-career recruitment running negative since late 2022 and the UK the only G7 economy to record higher inactivity since the pandemic. Companies that build a supply of prepared, motivated candidates now will be recruiting from a pool their competitors have not touched, at a point when replacement costs and wage pressure for skilled entry-level staff continue to climb.

Putting opportunity within reach

Targeting has become as deliberate as programme design. The new schemes concentrate on schools with a high proportion of pupils receiving free school meals and areas with elevated numbers of young people outside education or work, on the reasoning that a placement is worth most where personal connections are scarcest.

Geography also determines the commercial return. Disengagement clusters in the North and in coastal communities, precisely the regions where distribution centres, manufacturing sites and store estates are frequently located and where recruitment can prove hardest. A programme aimed at these communities is simultaneously a social intervention and a solution to a local staffing problem.

Delivery partners give the approach reach that individual companies cannot achieve alone. The Careers & Enterprise Company, the Institute of Grocery Distribution, The School Outreach Company, Movement to Work and specialist provider Aim a Little Higher are each carrying elements of the current programmes, handling school engagement, workshop delivery and recruitment marketing. The division of labour keeps employers focused on the one thing only they can supply, which is genuine access to a working business.

A new route into the workforce

Government reform has opened a clearer route into schools. New technical education pathways launched last month give 14 year olds early access to skills training, work experience and connections with local employers, with the stated aim of putting technical routes on equal footing with academic ones. Companies now have a structured point of entry that did not exist a year ago, and the early movers will shape what the pathways teach.

The current wave is being treated as a test rather than a finished product. A parallel pilot for 14 to 18 year olds, run with The Careers & Enterprise Company and the Institute of Grocery Distribution, aims to produce a model capable of extending across more sites from 2027, which would give the wider market something proven to adopt without the cost of designing it independently.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has encouraged other companies to follow, on the argument that opportunity should not depend on who a young person happens to know. The components are now well documented, combining sustained workplace exposure, recruitment preparation and deliberate geographic focus, and the investment required is measured in colleague hours more than capital. Firms that build these routes now will be meeting the next generation of applicants, and shaping their expectations of work, well before anyone else reaches them.