Deema Khunda: An obsession with credentialism is another barrier to youth entry into the workforce.

Dr Deema Khunda is an energy rand Thatcher fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies.

“Education is not acquiring a stock of ready-made ideas, images, sentiments, beliefs and so forth; it is learning to look, to listen, to think, to feel, to imagine, to believe, to understand, to choose and to wish.”

~ Michael Oakeshott, The Voice Of Liberal Learning

Forget Labour’s tax rises, forget the malign legacy of the Covid lockdowns, forget Boomer electoral hegemony – credentialism by far the most significant barrier young people face to getting on the career ladder today.

The fact that one in eight Gen Zers in the UK right now is classified as a NEET appeared to have startled the commentariat class, but for many in my generation, it was hardly a revelation.

Getting your first job seems harder than ever. The Institute of Student Employers reported the competition for graduate roles is at a ‘record high’, with 1.2 million applications for 17,000 graduate vacancies last year. The precipitous drop in early-career hiring has been blamed on the rise of AI, but that explanation doesn’t provide the complete picture of the forces at work here.

An anaemic economy and the implementation of government policies that penalise new hiring undoubtedly worsen the crisis of youth unemployment. Still, they are not what sits at the heart of it.

The average new hire in 2025 was 42 years old – up from 40 in 2016. This suggests that when hiring does occur in a stagnant economy, it disproportionately favours older, established workers. Britain’s modern work culture’s near-religious reverence for “credentials” & ‘experience’ is driving youth unemployment.

A large-scale analysis by StandOut CV found that 37 per cent of entry-level job adverts on LinkedIn required around 2.5 years of prior work experience. Another 2025 report from recruitment firm CV Genius estimates that four in five entry-level roles now require “relevant experience”.

Furthermore, obtaining a master’s degree or an ever‑expanding alphabet of external accreditations, such as the Construction Skills Certification Scheme, LSSGB, PMP certificate, or IOSH safety training,  instantly puts applicants at the top of the list. Revealing that postgraduate qualifications are treated as the new competency indicator by employers.

While a debate can certainly be had over whether these qualifications improve on-the-job performance, what is already clear is that these requirements systematically favour older candidates – simply because early‑career applicants have not yet had the time to accumulate them.

This is perhaps another fallout from the expansion of the universities. As student populations doubled over the past three decades, recruiters and employers have responded in kind, moving beyond relying on university degrees as the gold standard.

So, what are we missing out on when access to the most critical roles within the economy is made contingent upon the possession of explicit, verifiable knowledge obtained in lectures and training courses? A good question to pose, particularly when a more innovative economy did not accompany this explosion of credentials. In the same period that many professions abandoned the on-the-job learning model, i.e., nursing, policing, and engineering, the UK economy has transitioned from a post-WWII industrial powerhouse to a service-dominated, slower-growth economy, marked by a “managed” decline compared to peers like Germany and the US.

Perhaps, just as gravity interacts with things we cannot see or detect, like “anti-matter”, skills & knowledge are transferred from individual to individual through unconventional and inarticulate means. This is what the finest philosophers & economists knew as “tacit knowledge”.

Philosophers such as Hayek and Oakeshott distinguished between formal, explicit knowledge and “tacit knowledge”: the know‑how embedded in lived experience.  An Olympic swimmer does not need to know the physical laws of fluid dynamics that produce the fastest stroke to win a gold medal. The same can be said of chess players: grandmasters “see” moves before they have time to calculate each variation of a line of moves. Similar comparisons can be found across many professions, including engineering, law, finance, and fintech, where competence exists independently of formal training. Modern hiring systems, obsessed with certification, ignore this form of competency.

Modern work culture views trusting an uncertified individual as reckless. Historically, it is precisely this trust, and risk, that drove innovation. A trust in an individual’s ability to learn, to grow, to bring fresh perspectives in the workplace and to challenge conventional means of practice and propose new ones. Credentialism compounds other pressures young people already face – from housing to student debt, but it is one we can fix more easily.

So, what are the solutions that can bring Britain’s youngest adults back en masse to the workforce?

The short-term quick fixes are clear. Firstly, several of Labour’s newly introduced policies will need to be reversed urgently, such as the Employment Rights Act 2025. High business rates, which have already bankrupted many youth-heavy employers, need to be abolished, as do increases in national insurance contributions and minimum wage hikes.

In the long term, the private sector must move away from using certificates as a substitute for judgment. A cultural shift is due, one that accepts taking risks as a necessary step towards growth.

I see youth unemployment as the most critical issue facing Britain today. Its long-term impact on our society at large dwarfs the cultural wars, the pronoun skirmishes, the speculation over Trump’s purchase of Greenland, or Putin’s territorial ambitions. Youth unemployment is one of the chief drivers for political radicalisation, plummeting birth rates and economic stagnation. Fix this one, and a great many solutions follow.