I left school at 16 with few qualifications and I did OK. But I honestly don’t know if I’d make it if I were starting again today. Young people have it far worse for young people breaking into the job market.
Being born in Drumchapel, Glasgow and brought up in relatively deprived areas gave me a huge appetite for work. University never really felt like an option. The formula seemed obvious.
I had to get a job, work my way up, and it would be a gateway to a good life.
I remember somebody telling me you needed a National Insurance number to apply for a job. I waited months for mine to arrive, and when it finally did, I told everyone I knew and asked if they’d heard of any jobs going. My friend Danny worked in a supermarket called Somerfield and managed to speak to his boss to get me an interview. I don’t remember much about it, apart from Kate, who interviewed me, and how I managed to embarrass myself. She asked if I was flexible. I assumed she was asking whether I could stretch to stack products on a high shelf, so I told her I could do the splits. It was only
when I left that I realised she meant flexible enough to take shifts at short notice.
Despite my youthful stupidity, I got the job, and it was a foot in the door of the world of work. It was a steppingstone to a couple of jobs involving an element of sales.
In my free time I taught myself digital marketing, helped a few folk build websites and generate sales online, and landed an entry-level position as a digital marketing executive.
A few years later I became digital marketing manager for one of the UK’s largest automotive retailers, and the skills I learned there helped me start my own digital advertising agency.
That route, the one that took me from stacking shelves to running a business, is closing for young people. A perfect storm of wage costs, automation and overseas outsourcing has tipped the odds against them.
I was chatting to my niece recently. She’d been for an interview for a cleaning job and got talking to the other candidates. One of them had 10 years’ experience, and it dawned on her that this was who she was up against. Why, she thought, would somebody hire me when they can pay the same money for someone with a decade of experience? As much as I can see why the minimum wage is a good thing, if an employer is paying the same for a 30-year-old with 10 years’ experience and a 21-year-old with none, you can see who they’re likely to hire.
Keep in mind that employers have also faced increases in mandatory pension contributions and hikes in National Insurance in recent years. From what I hear, interviews for jobs that used to be entry-level are far tougher today than they were 20 years ago. And other candidates aren’t the only competition.
Walk into most supermarkets and it’s now the customer’s job to scan their own shopping. When I worked in a supermarket, there were 10 tills open, each job helping somebody earn a living.
My local supermarket now has nine self-checkouts and one operated by a human being.
The first job I got at a digital agency probably doesn’t exist today. The laborious tasks nobody wanted to do can now be handled by AI or outsourced overseas at a fraction of the cost.
Young folk are competing with machines that don’t get a wage, don’t need a pension and never take a tea break. And if that doesn’t stop them getting a job, they’re also competing with people 6,000 miles away, in places where companies pay lower wages and don’t have to worry about NI or pensions.
All the while, money is taken out of local communities and young people are robbed of the chance many of us had.
If the government doesn’t act and create powerful incentives to employ young people here, we’re going to end up with a lost generation.
There need to be far greater incentives to hire people into entry-level positions. If we don’t, we’ll face massive problems as the working population ages and there’s nobody with the experience to replace them. I got my chance because a supermarket was willing to take on a daft 16-year-old who thought “flexible” meant doing the splits.
Today’s young people are smarter than I ever was. They, at least, deserve the same chance.
Gordon Campbell is the co-founder of the leading Glasgow-based PPC and social ads agency ClickBoost.
