With the number of young Britons not in education, employment or training (NEET) closing in on the one million mark, McDonald’s UK has stepped into the breach with what it claims is the largest in-person work experience programme the country has ever seen.
The fast-food giant, one of the UK’s biggest employers of under-25s, today unveiled a nationwide scheme offering 2,500 paid placements in its first year, with a stated ambition to scale the commitment annually. Crucially for a generation increasingly priced out of unpaid internships, every placement will come with a wage attached.
The initiative will be delivered through McDonald’s network of franchisees, the local business owners who run the bulk of its 1,400-plus restaurants, and will be deliberately weighted towards the country’s NEET hotspots. A quarter of all placements have been earmarked for young people who are already NEET or considered at risk of becoming so.
To underpin the launch, McDonald’s has commissioned its first Youth Confidence Index, a piece of research that lays bare the gap between aspiration and opportunity confronting Britain’s under-25s. While 80 per cent of those in education, training or employment believe they have something positive to offer society, that figure plunges to 57 per cent among the NEET cohort. Two-thirds (67 per cent) of young people surveyed said they would jump at the chance to do work experience but cannot find it; almost seven in ten (69 per cent) cited a lack of opportunities locally, while 61 per cent said they simply could not afford to work for free.
It is a familiar picture to anyone who has covered the small business beat over the past decade, a labour market in which entry-level roles have thinned, hospitality and retail vacancies are no longer the rite of passage they once were, and the Bank of Mum and Dad has quietly become a prerequisite for a foot on the career ladder.
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