Youth Employment Week: helping young people build skills for the future
Holly Firmin, Senior Community Partnerships Manager at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, discusses the critical role of partnerships and youth work in empowering young people and creating pathways to employment.
It’s an important week in the calendar for us at CCEP, and for me personally. It marks the start of Youth Employment Week but also World Youth Skills Day, both of which highlight the complex landscape facing young people, as well as the untapped potential of this demographic.
For us, it’s also about recognising and supporting the people and organisations that help to give young people that leg up.
That means championing the vital role of youth work and organisations like UK Youth, who play a crucial role in bettering young people’s outcomes, which is needed now more than ever.
Sadly, 30% of young people feel they will never achieve their career aspirations and over 200,000 young people feel they will never work1.
That’s a really worrying statistic that we as businesses have got to do something about.
At CCEP, we believe every young person should have the opportunity to thrive, no matter their background or experience.
Youth work is an essential tool to help young people navigate these tricky times and set them up with skills for life, so why aren’t we doing more to support youth work provision?
Unleashing the partnership potential
First thing’s first, while businesses have a huge part to play in supporting the skills agenda, we recognise we don’t have all the answers. But we do have the connections and networks to help lead us to those answers – and that’s where partnerships come into play.
We’ve been working with an array of organisations to bring together our respective toolboxes to find solutions to meet the needs of specific groups and communities. For example, we’ve forged partnerships with organisations like Special Olympics GB, U-Explore and Community Shop so we can support groups of people who might face barriers to employment, working with them to build confidence and develop skills that could help them get into work. Through these partnerships, we aim to support the skills and development of 60,000 people facing barriers in the labour market in Great Britain by 2030.
Our partnership with UK Youth is one we’re particularly proud of, and which has evolved over the past seven years to cater for the specific needs of young people. Our Reach Up programme, launched in 2018, supported more than 400 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 not in employment, education or training (NEETs) by offering workshops – in virtual, in-person and hybrid formats – to help young people overcome barriers to employment, build confidence and improve their understanding of the world of work.
Creating pathways for young people
We’ve taken this one step further, and have since launched the ‘Building Connections’ programme with UK Youth. The initiative supports youth workers to create stronger pathways to employment for young people. I firmly believe that one of the biggest challenges facing young people is the lack of knowledge around the jobs and opportunities that actually exist. One of the ways to break this down is through having the opportunity to speak to people in different roles and through having access to a variety of businesses to understand and demystify the corporate world.
Through Building Connections, we’ve been able to put our weight behind the power of youth work and create a space for young people across different parts of the UK to learn about the local job opportunities available to them. By investing and equipping youth workers with training and knowledge, they are supported to ensure that young people in their communities are exposed to a range of industries and opportunities through events, workshops or other creative ways to create pathways to employment in their local area.
We’ve supported 1430 young people through the programme so far, working with incredible youth organisations including Sussex Clubs for Young People, Young Leicestershire, Greater Manchester Youth Network and Together as One, who provide vital ongoing support to young people in their local communities. We’ll shortly be extending our reach to another six youth organisations, plus we were pleased to see Direct Line Group back our collective mission as they became the latest Building Connections delivery partner last summer
We know youth work has a positive impact on outcomes for young people. A recent study from UK Youth and environmental consultant SQW and University of Essex shows us that there is strong evidence to suggest the short-term outcomes associated with youth work – improved physical health, wellbeing, pro-social behaviours and education – are sustained over decades. It suggests people who had participated in youth work earlier in life were happier, healthier, wealthier – and more actively involved in their communities.
Youth work is life-changing – and even life-saving. As we get closer to school results days this summer, I’d really love to continue to build on the momentum we’ve seen in recent months and see more businesses harnessing the power of youth work and getting involved to support young people in any ways they can. We could put all our efforts into training young people in CV writing and interview skills, but if the pathways and opportunities don’t exist, the training alone will not solve youth unemployment.
We need to leverage our scale and weight as businesses to collaborate and create even more opportunities. Only then will we be able to help as many young people as possible access the support they need to thrive.
1.https://www.cityandguilds.com/news/december-2022/youth-misspent-uncovering-harsh-realities-for-britains-young-people-in-todays-job-market
PoliticsHome Newsletters
Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.
