Young people are 3 times more likely to be unemployed than adults. How’s that for a merry statistic? Well there’s plenty more to come as BBC3 have put together another documentary for and about young people, this time about the perils of a life of unemployment. Meet the ‘boomerang generation’, those who go off to uni and end up back at home for years as they cant afford to move out, and the rest, who just can’t find work full stop. Brace yourself.
Radio 1 stud Greg James is our presenter for the evening, a charming, approachable looking young man who schlepped up and down the country offering his sincerest sympathies to the unemployed young people he meets. He is a self -confessed ‘lucky one’, landing his job at Radio 1 immediately after graduating from university, and he’s all too aware that this is a rarity these days.
Throughout the programme we learn a few worrying statistics, like that as many as 1 in 5 16 to 24 year olds are unemployed and 2 in 5 people in their early 20s are living with their parents as they are unable to afford to move out. For the next hour Greg meets as cross section of desperate young folk, each pursuing very different paths to employment, and I despair. It’s so sad and so completely and utterly true, that if you’re under 25 and in decent employment, you’re darn lucky.
After a meeting with one of the unemployed younglings, Greg muses to the camera an analogy of education being like a conveyor belt, from primary school right the way up to university and then BAM! You’re on you own; you fall off the belt and don’t know what happens next. A feeling I’m sure many of you reading this will understand all too well.
The case studies picked for this couldn’t be more different, each with their naiveties and dreams waiting to be inevitably crushed. When we meet 18 year old Becca who gushes that in a year’s time she hopes to be pregnant, or already with a baby, living with her boyfriend in their own apartment paid for with his fantastic job (that he hasn’t got yet) you have to wonder what planet she’s living on. It takes her months and countless cv handing out and repeated applications to get her a part time job at Whetherspoons, which in the end she loves. Oh and they do get a flat AND have a baby. It is nice when things work out for people.
Less success stories for the other participants however, as only 1 of the 6-featured lands his ‘dream job’ in the music biz and that’s only after about a year of unpaid work and he even admits to being lucky as it can usually take 2 or 3. The most prominent point of the documentary I found was that not only is the quest for a job often a long and arduous one, but quite often for young people with actual skills, be it training in a specific field or a qualification, there aren’t enough jobs to fit that criteria, so people end up in the poorly paid, part time jobs, as there are always those about.
This is a subject matter that is all too close to home for me. I am a graduate, but I am not unemployed and I don’t live with my parents. So whilst I’m not another statistic that would fit in with this documentary, alas I work part time in a bar, as I cannot find THAT job I want. But if this documentary preaches something we all know, its that persistence is the key.
Catch Young, Jobless and Living at home here
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