Choosing To Work

by Becky Holloway

With new legislation keeping young people in education until they’re 18, and daily headlines reminding us of a struggling labour market that requires more and higher qualifications- it’s easy to assume that early entry into employment (at 16 and 17) is a route reserved only for those young people unable (or unwilling) to pursue other pathways. Be that through a lack of qualifications or a misguided disinclination to continue in education.

It has been my privilege, over the course of the last eighteen months to speak to many 16 and 17-year-olds working in and around Sheffield. To say I could sum up the stories they’ve told me in the short space of a blog, would be to do them a disservice, and would at any rate present an impossible task. The purpose of the next few paragraphs, therefore, is to argue that choosing to work is not only a far cry from choosing to fail but is often a response to widely-held views on the current labour market.

Young workers had mixed opinions on the requirement to stay in education for longer, but most explained that their desire to enter employment at 16 or 17 was founded on a wish to get a foot in the door. A recognition of what we are increasingly led to believe is a highly competitive labour market in which the acquisition of qualifications (even at degree level) fail to add much in the way of long-term employment security. The increasing precarity of work, far from encouraging young people to delay their entry into the labour market, instead acted as an incentive and an added pressure to start working sooner than their peers to give them a competitive edge. Take as an example, the following extract taken from an interview with Emma, a white British young woman who had started working for a PR company at 16:

Emma: Like, for me, I had a choice between an apprenticeship at £2.68 an hour, which although it would have got me skills and a proper job at the end of it, I can get paid at eight pound, nine pound, ten pound an hour, and have a job that’s just as secure. In fact probably more secure, because not all apprenticeships guarantee a job at the end of it, and they want you to bring in more and more apprenticeships, but, what are they going to do afterwards? Like, they’re promising skills but no jobs. Whereas I can go into an employer and get a job that’s willing to sort of nurture the skills that I’ve already got, and it be permanent

And you’ve got some experience under your belt for when you want to move on

Emma: Yeah, I’ve got over a year’s experience in office administration, receptionist, account management, I’m 17. My CV’s like three pages long. I used to work for [a charity], I did some work for my dad, and obviously I’m part of the union as well so I do that work

So you’ve got loads to talk about

Emma: whereas I don’t think there’s a lot of opportunities for people to do that anymore, like a lot of people, like all the people I’ve been to college with, will be starting uni this year, and they’re not going to have any [work] experience

My research findings do not underestimate the widespread, and not insignificant, challenges that young workers face. Yet while they talked, sometimes at length, about the difficulties associated with their employment, the different perspectives shared by the young people I spoke to were all shaped by a promise of hope for the future. Regardless of how little they enjoyed their work, how bad their pay or hours were, or how insecure their contracts, the majority of young people were confident and hopeful about their ability to lead a more desirable life in the future.

This narrative of valuing work experience over qualifications is reflected in the other (quantitative) strand of my research which maps the pathways of young people from leaving year 11 to the end of their second year of post-16 activity. This mapping exercise found that once they have entered their first job, young people are much more likely to remain in work for the duration (often in different jobs) than to get into the churn experienced by young people in NEET and/or personal development or work-based learning opportunities.

The young workers I spoke to came from different backgrounds, different parts of the city, and had different ambitions for the future. What they had in common was the desire to work, be valued for that work, and to have the freedom to take control of building the career and lifestyle that that wanted.

Becky Holloway is a PhD Student at Sheffield.

You can find her on Twitter here.