After she was made redundant from her role as a writer for French travel firm Voyage Privé in July, Abigail Lister, 24, found herself “firing off applications for literally any job I could find”. Despite applying for nearly 100 vacancies, she was unable to secure permanent full-time employment.
“It just seemed impossible,” says Lister, who estimates that she heard back from only 10% of the employers she’d contacted. “So many young people with similar skills were applying for the same jobs.”
Lister has since become a successful freelance writer, but her experience during the Covid crisis is not unusual. The number of payrolled employees in the UK over the 12 months from March 2020 fell by 813,000, according to the Office for National Statistics. Of this total, 53.7% were aged under 25.