Milburn’s Missing First Rung and What It Means for Graduate Employability
Most adults of a certain age can remember their first ever job. And let’s face it, it probably wasn’t as a lawyer, accountant or a premiership footballer – graduate employability wasn’t even a thing back then.
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More likely, it was stacking shelves at a supermarket, washing dishes in a pub kitchen, or collecting glasses on a Friday night or delivering newspapers before most of the neighbourhood had opened its curtains. The work was distinctly unglamorous. It was often repetitive, poorly paid and let’s not beat about the bush, mind-numbingly boring.
Yet those jobs performed a function that only becomes obvious when they’re long gone. They taught us how work worked. More importantly, they taught us how adulthood worked.
I still remember my first job at age 13 – a paper round. Up at 5.30am, report to the shop for 6am, long before social media was even a glint in Zuckerberg’s eye, I inherited Paper Round #3, the route nobody else wanted. It stretched for nearly 3 miles up the A32 Fareham Road in Hampshire, past some very large houses and long driveways, for the princely sum of about £6 a week.
To most of my peers, it was the most tedious round. To me, it was transformative. It taught me discipline, reliability and responsibility. It also exposed me to lives very different from my own and strengthened my aspirations. Looking back, the money mattered far less than the life lessons.
Few people would seriously propose newspaper delivery as the foundation of Britain’s economic strategy. Yet there is a serious point hidden inside the nostalgia. Those seemingly mundane jobs acted as a bridge between childhood and adulthood. They offered responsibility before careers, confidence before qualifications and experience before expertise. They allowed young people to prove themselves, often for the first time.
Today, many of those bridges have all but disappeared.
Keith Rozelle has spent three decades in complex B2B sales and advisory roles, from City of London boardrooms to high-growth SMEs. He now works with Higher Education leadership teams on student recruitment, conversion and supporting connectivity programmes with SMEs.
What Alan Milburn’s Warning Really Means
That missing first rung was the uncomfortable message at the heart of Alan Milburn’s recent interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The headline statistic was striking enough. Nearly one million young people in Britain are now classified as NEETs: not in education, employment or training. Yet the number itself may be less important than what it represents.
Behind it lies a growing disconnect between education and work, between potential and opportunity, and between what society tells young people to do and what actually awaits them when they follow the advice.
The temptation is to explain the problem by focusing on the young people themselves. Every generation seems convinced that the next one is less resilient, less ambitious or less willing to work. It is a comforting explanation because it places responsibility elsewhere.
The difficulty is that the evidence does not support it.
Milburn highlighted that Britain’s youth detachment rate is roughly twice that of Ireland and three times that of the Netherlands. If young people themselves were the primary cause of the problem, those differences would be difficult to explain. Young people in Manchester are not fundamentally different from young people in Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Dublin.
The more plausible explanation is that some countries have become better at helping people make the transition from education into employment.
That distinction matters because it shifts the conversation from attitudes to systems.
Listen: ‘Moral crisis’ of young people out of work and training
The Disappearing Bridge Between Education And Work
For decades, Britain benefited from countless informal routes into work. Saturday jobs, summer jobs, apprenticeships, work experience placements, junior office roles and entry-level customer service positions all acted as stepping stones. They were rarely discussed in policy papers because they seemed ordinary. Yet collectively they performed an extraordinary function.
They helped young people acquire confidence, credibility and practical experience long before they entered professional careers.
Many of those stepping stones have now disappeared.
According to Milburn, more than one million low and medium-skilled jobs have vanished from the economy. Apprenticeship starts have fallen significantly. Traditional part-time employment opportunities have contracted. Even the humble Saturday job, once a rite of passage for millions, has become increasingly rare.
What disappears with those jobs is not simply income.
It is opportunity.
It is exposure.
It is aspiration.
Most importantly, it is evidence. Evidence that somebody trusted you enough to give you responsibility. Evidence that you can operate in a workplace. Evidence that you can contribute.
These things may sound small, but they matter enormously when young people begin competing for graduate positions.
Why Graduate Employability Has Become A Strategic Issue
This is where the conversation becomes particularly relevant for universities.
For much of the past century, higher education could reasonably define success through academic achievement. Universities educated students, awarded qualifications and equipped graduates with knowledge and critical thinking skills. The labour market largely took care of the rest.
Increasingly, that assumption looks difficult to sustain.
This is not because universities are becoming businesses, nor because education should be reduced to employment outcomes. A university education should always be about more than preparing people for jobs. It should develop judgement, curiosity, intellectual capability and the ability to think critically about the world.
Yet students, parents, employers and governments are increasingly asking a question that cannot easily be ignored.
What happens next?
Graduate employability has moved from a peripheral concern to a strategic issue. Not because league tables say so, but because the labour market itself has changed. The traditional assumption that a degree naturally leads to opportunity is becoming less reliable.
In a more competitive economy, possessing knowledge is no longer enough. Graduates must also demonstrate capability, adaptability and practical experience.
Read: Rankings are all well and good, but now there’s a second test
A Different Contract Between Universities And Students
This creates an uncomfortable tension for universities.
Many institutions remain measured primarily on academic metrics while simultaneously being judged on graduate outcomes. The challenge is not simply educational. It is structural. Universities increasingly find themselves responsible for preparing students for a labour market over which they have limited control.
In many respects, the contract between universities and students is changing. Students still come to university to learn, explore and grow. Yet they also expect guidance, connections and support in navigating a labour market that appears increasingly uncertain – graduate employability is vital.
The institutions that recognise this reality early are likely to be the institutions that thrive.
AI, Automation And The New Entry-Level Challenge
The arrival of artificial intelligence adds another layer of complexity.
Much of the public discussion has focused on jobs that AI might replace. The more immediate concern may be the jobs AI prevents from existing in the first place.
Historically, organisations created entry-level roles because certain tasks required human labour. Administrative support, research assistance, data processing, content creation and customer service all provided opportunities for inexperienced employees to learn how organisations worked.
Increasingly, many of these functions are being automated.
From a productivity perspective, this makes perfect sense.
From a graduate employability perspective, however, it raises difficult questions.
If technology removes the lower rungs of the ladder, where do young people gain their first experience? How do they build confidence? How do they learn professional behaviours? How do they develop credibility?
Economic transitions rarely hurt established professionals first. They tend to hurt those trying to enter the system, graduate employability a vital pre-requisite.
Confidence Requires Evidence
That reality helps explain why confidence has become such an important factor in graduate employability.
Not confidence in the motivational poster sense.
Confidence based on evidence.
A student may be intelligent, creative and highly capable. Yet if they have never worked with clients, managed a project, solved a business problem or taken responsibility for an outcome, they often struggle to articulate their value.
Employers notice this. Graduates notice it too.
The result can become a vicious circle. Lack of experience reduces confidence. Reduced confidence weakens applications. Weaker applications lead to fewer opportunities. Fewer opportunities further reduce confidence.
Breaking that cycle requires intervention. Not necessarily large intervention, but deliberate intervention.
Visibility, Networks, And Social Capital
It also requires us to recognise that employability increasingly depends upon visibility.
Students from professional families often inherit networks, mentors and informal guidance. Others do not.
As traditional pathways disappear, social capital becomes increasingly valuable.
This is where universities have an opportunity to play a uniquely important role. Not merely as providers of education, but as builders of bridges. Connections to employers, alumni communities, mentoring programmes, industry exposure, professional networks and opportunities for students to encounter the realities of work before graduation all have an important role to play.
Digital platforms have a role here too.
LinkedIn, for example, allows students to demonstrate achievements, projects and interests long before they accumulate years of experience. Emerging tools such as LinkedGPT can help students communicate their capabilities more effectively.
These tools are not substitutes for experience.
But they can make potential more visible.
And visibility matters.
What Internships Reveal About Graduate Employability
Discussions about graduate employability often treat internships as either a miracle cure or an unnecessary distraction. Both positions miss the point. Internships are not valuable because they are magical, they are valuable because they provide evidence.
Evidence of capability.
Evidence of reliability.
Evidence that somebody outside the university has trusted a student with real responsibility.
Students gain confidence. Employers gain insight. Both sides learn something useful.
Designing Employability Into The Student Journey
The deeper lesson is not that every student needs an internship.
Graduate Employability should be designed-in to the student journey rather than bolted on at the end.
Too often, practical experience is treated as a final-year activity. A last-minute attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Yet confidence, credibility and professional identity develop over time. They accumulate through repeated exposure to real-world situations.
Not every student requires a year-long placement. Not every course can accommodate extensive workplace experience but every student benefits from meaningful exposure to professional life.
That exposure may prove to be one of the most valuable components of a modern education.
Who Will Rebuild The First Rung?
Perhaps that is the most important lesson from Milburn’s warning.
We have spent years debating whether young people have become less resilient, less ambitious or less willing to work. Yet those explanations feel increasingly inadequate when compared with countries facing many of the same technological and economic pressures while achieving better outcomes.
The uncomfortable possibility is that the problem is not the young people at all.
It is the environment we have created around them.
An environment in which entry-level jobs have disappeared, apprenticeships have declined, informal work opportunities have contracted and practical experience has become harder to obtain. An environment in which we continue to talk about social mobility while quietly dismantling some of the mechanisms that once made it possible.
The first rung has not vanished overnight. It has been removed gradually, piece by piece, often without much public debate.
The task now is not simply to acknowledge its absence.
The task is to rebuild it.
Universities cannot do that alone.
Employers cannot do it alone.
Government cannot do it alone.
But together they can.
Because nearly one million young people are currently waiting for an opportunity to prove what they can do. My paper round paid about £6 a week. By any economic measure it was insignificant. Yet it provided something that proved enormously valuable: a place to start.
Britain’s challenge today is not simply creating more opportunities for young people. It is rebuilding the pathways that allow those opportunities to be found.
The problem is not that young people refuse to climb the ladder. The problem is that, for too many of them, the first rung is no longer there. The question is no longer whether we recognise the problem.
The question is: “Who will help rebuild it?”