The missing piece of the puzzle in the NEET crisis

The Government-commissioned Milburn Review confirmed the problem that many of us in business have seen coming for years.

Nearly one million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET).

That’s around one in eight.

I have been watching this problem loom for the better part of two decades, and I started building my business KLIK SaaS® specifically because I could see where we were heading.

I had spent 15 years in specialist recruitment, watching the problem every day: employers couldn’t find the people they needed; young people couldn’t find the opportunities that existed; and the string of industry bodies, trade associations and membership organisations who should have been perfectly positioned to connect the two were struggling to do so.

It’s not that they didn’t want to. It’s because they didn’t have the infrastructure to do so.

The institutions that should be supporting young people into work are, bluntly, fragmented and uncoordinated.

That is the Milburn Review’s finding, and it matches what I saw on the ground across years of search, retained and contingency recruitment.

The frustration is that the organisations that sit at the centre of Britain’s industries – membership bodies, trade associations, chambers of commerce and other professional networks – already have the solution to a more functional skills system.

They have the direct relationships with employers, the connections to colleges and training providers, and communities of practitioners who between them know exactly where the opportunities are and where the talent is.

What they’re missing is a single, signposted environment where that is delivered to make sure the opportunities reach the young people who need them.

I’m a proud 'Smoggie' and my business is based in Hartlepool, so I know the North East feels this problem more keenly than most.

As a region, we have world-class employers, strong further education colleges, strong industry in manufacturing, energy and technology, and a generation of young people who want to work.

However, a young person in Hartlepool and a vacancy in Teesside can exist within ten miles of each other and never connect, despite the young person being fully capable of filling it.

That is because the system that should be linking them is spread across agencies and intermediaries that aren’t designed to serve the best interests of businesses, applicants or the region itself.

The organisations that could change that are sitting on the potential to connect, but many of them don’t even realise it.

That potential needs to be funnelled into something.

The Government programmes that the Milburn Review calls for will shape the system over years.

But, in the meantime, the organisations at the centre of their industries can close the connection gap now with infrastructure that already exists.

Hartlepool has one of the highest NEET rates in the country.

It is also where I chose to build KLIK. That is not a coincidence.

Kelly Whitfield is founder and chief executive of KLIK SaaS®, a white-label platform that helps organisations own, manage and monetise professional communities

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