When “Not job ready” is not the answer. Press enter or click to view image in full size I had a conversation with my team a couple of weeks ago, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. We were going through research on what employers find most frustrating about hiring young people. And one phrase kept coming up, over and over again. Not job ready. It’s everywhere. Employer surveys. Skills reports. Parliamentary debates. “Young people are not job-ready” has basically become received wisdom, and something everyone nods along to without really stopping to examine it. And sitting there in that meeting, something in me just snapped. Why would they be? I didn’t say it as a rhetorical point. It was a genuine question. Why, given everything that has changed in the last fifteen to twenty years, would we expect young people to arrive at work already knowing how work works? Back when I was ‘young’ (I was born in 1975, you can do the maths to work out my age), there used to be an informal training ground.…