The UK is approaching a troubling milestone, with nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training – also known as Neet. According to the latest official estimate from the Office for National Statistics, almost one million people aged 16 to 24 fell into this category between October and December 2025.
That figure could be viewed as a social issue. Something for government, schools and parents to worry about. But business leaders should read it differently. Because while the Neet number climbs, many organisations are doing something else quietly and with the best of intentions for the business. They are cutting entry-level work in favour of AI and automation.
In isolation, that decision can look like common sense. Early-career roles are expensive and margins are tight. AI tools can now do the first draft, the research summary, the initial analysis and the inbox triage. Why pay for juniors to do work that software can do faster?
However, entry-level work has never been valuable mainly for the tasks it completes. It is valuable for what it produces – judgement. And judgement is about to become the rarest capability in the labour market.
The problem becomes clearer when we stop focusing on job titles and start focusing on the work. Entry roles have traditionally been where people learn how to operate in a real organisation. How to handle ambiguity, how to deal with competing priorities, how to write something that lands with a human being, how to check quality or how to ask the right questions when the brief is fuzzy. Those skills are not academic. They are learnt through experience, repetition, feedback and time.
When you remove the entry rungs you don’t remove the work. You push it upwards and this is where the hidden bill arrives from an increasingly compressed and overloaded middle layer, which is doing the coordination, quality control and stakeholder management those juniors used to absorb. Over time, that compression could reduce managerial bandwidth, slow decision-making and increases burnout risk. This won’t happen because managers suddenly became less resilient, but because the system stopped providing them that unseen support.
Meanwhile, the other end of the workforce is often mishandled too as over 55s are overlooked because of lazy assumptions about tech capability, even though this cohort brings deep organisational knowledge, pattern recognition and the ability to navigate complexity. So, you end up with a workforce stuck at both ends.
If not addressed, by 2030, many firms will have sleepwalked into a talent crisis that makes today’s skills shortages feel modest because we dismantled the pipeline that turns excited early careers people into excited capable ones.
This is why the most valuable skills in the next decade are unlikely to be purely technical. Yes, organisations need people who can work fluently with AI. But the scarcest capabilities will be stubbornly human. The most valuable commodities will become relationship handling, storytelling, quality control and knowing when to push or pause with a client. These are the skills that stop automation scaling mistakes as efficiently as it scales productivity.
The irony is that the more AI we deploy, the more we need humans who can judge what good looks like. The early careers market is already sending signals that something has shifted. As applications surge, graduates have discovered that being bright is no longer enough. Employers are looking for evidence of learnability, adaptability and practical judgement and many are beginning to move towards skills-based hiring as the only realistic way to keep pace with changing work.
What is needed is a new lens on early careers development. Not the traditional timed served, but rather one that is purposeful in the experiences it delivers, the exposure it gives and the outcomes it is trying to deliver. Leaders need to identify the critical human skills their organisation cannot afford to lose, redesign work as tasks underpinned by skills and keep a deliberate and different early careers pathway alive even in a tight market. Not as charity or branding, but as business continuity.
The Neets figure may look like a headline about young people. But it is also a warning about the future capability of British business. If the talent hosepipe is being turned off, we shouldn’t be surprised when the system runs dry.
Aaron Alburey, founder of LACE Partners, a UK consulting firm.
The UK is approaching a troubling milestone, with nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training - also known as Neet. According to the latest official estimate from the Office for National Statistics, almost one million people aged 16 to 24 fell into this category between October and December 2025.
That figure could be viewed as a social issue. Something for government, schools and parents to worry about. But business leaders should read it differently. Because while the Neet number climbs, many organisations are doing something else quietly and with the best of intentions for the business. They are cutting entry-level work in favour of AI and automation.
In isolation, that decision can look like common sense. Early-career roles are expensive and margins are tight. AI tools can now do the first draft, the research summary, the initial analysis and the inbox triage. Why pay for juniors to do work that software can do faster?
