Thank you, Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for comments that were widely reported as criticising young people who are not in work, education or training.
And no, we are not lazy.
The job market is failing us.
That may sound harsh. It is also difficult to interpret the current situation any other way.
Young people are told to work harder, apply more widely, accept less and stop making excuses. Disabled people are told that work is good for us, that there are vacancies everywhere and that we should be grateful for whatever employment somebody is willing to offer.
Meanwhile, employers ask for experience before they will provide experience, treat qualifications as suspicious, treat disability as a risk and advertise “entry-level” jobs that apparently require several years of previous employment.
Then politicians look at the resulting unemployment and decide that the problem must be our attitude.
Brilliant.
Entry level*
There is something uniquely irritating about searching for an entry-level job and discovering that apparently nobody agrees on what entry level means.
You find something that looks promising:
Junior. Assistant. Trainee. Administrator.
Lovely.
Then you scroll down and find “two years’ previous experience preferred”, or one year, or experience in that exact industry, or experience with some internal system that presumably nobody was born knowing how to use.
Sometimes the experience is only “desirable”, which is better, except you know perfectly well that if fifty people apply and ten of them have already done the same job somewhere else, the distinction between desirable and required becomes somewhat academic.
How, exactly, are you supposed to acquire the experience required for an entry-level job if entry-level jobs preferentially hire people who already have experience?
Answers on a postcard.
I knew the job market wasn’t going to fling open its doors because I had finished college. I’m not that naïve. I didn’t expect to upload a CV one morning and be issued a salary by teatime. This isn’t the 1950s.
But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and experiencing it every day through an endless sequence of job listings.
There is also a difference between being told that qualifications will make you employable and discovering that they apparently only make you eligible to be rejected by a slightly wider range of employers.
The refusal to hire Gen Z is not always explicit. Employers do not usually write “young people need not apply” at the top of a listing. They write “must demonstrate commercial experience”, “must be confident from day one”, “must be able to hit the ground running” and “must have a proven track record”.
Those phrases sound neutral until you notice what they do.
They turn youth into evidence against us.
A young applicant is not treated as somebody at the beginning of a career. They are treated as somebody who has failed to have a career already.
We are expected to arrive with the confidence of experienced employees, the flexibility of trainees, the energy of interns and the salary expectations of people who have not yet had time to build a life.
That is not an entry-level opportunity. It is an experienced worker being offered a junior wage.
Entry level is not entry level??
I am still confused about what employers think “entry level” means.
I thought it meant the level at which somebody enters an industry.
That seemed fairly intuitive. You have not worked in the field before, so the employer expects to teach you how the organisation works, show you the systems, explain the processes and allow you some time to become useful.
Apparently not.
Apparently “entry level” means that you are entering the organisation with several years of experience, a proven track record, confidence using systems you have never seen before, the ability to work independently from the first morning and enough knowledge of the industry to require no meaningful training.
At which point I have a question:
Entry into what?
Because if I already have the experience, confidence, track record and industry knowledge required to do the job without training, then I am not entering the field. I am returning to it.
That is not entry level. That is somebody who has already entered, progressed and is now being asked to accept an entry-level salary for the privilege of pretending they are new.
Maybe I have misunderstood the phrase.
Maybe “entry level” means “entry level for the employer”, as in the lowest level at which they are willing to hire somebody, regardless of whether the applicant is actually at the beginning of their career.
Maybe it means “we would like a mid-level employee, but we would prefer not to pay for one”.
Maybe it means “we will train you, provided you already know everything”.
Maybe it means “junior” in the job title and “senior” in the expectations.
I genuinely do not know anymore.
The job listing says “no experience necessary”, then asks for experience. It says “full training provided”, then lists three systems I must already know. It says “ideal for someone starting their career”, then asks for a proven track record in the exact role.
It says “entry level”, but the entry appears to be located somewhere above the roof.
And when I look at the requirements, I cannot work out whether I am underqualified, overqualified or simply applying to the wrong definition of the word “entry”.
I have qualifications, but qualifications are not experience.
I have practical experience, but apparently self-directed work is not commercial experience.
I have built software, but apparently building software is not the same as having been employed to build software.
I can learn quickly, but apparently learning quickly only counts if I have already learned the thing I am applying to learn.
I am at the beginning of my career, but employers want evidence that I am already somewhere in the middle of it.
So what exactly is the expected sequence?
Do I enter at entry level with no experience?
Do I acquire experience before entering?
Do I enter at a higher level because I have experience, then get rejected because I am too young?
Do I apply for junior roles and explain that I am junior, but not inexperienced?
Do I apply for administrative roles and hope that my IT background is interpreted as useful rather than evidence that I will leave?
Do I apply for jobs that require experience and lie?
I would prefer not to lie on applications. It seems like a poor foundation for a working relationship.
The whole thing has become so confused that “entry level” no longer describes the applicant’s position. It describes the employer’s expectations of how cheaply they can obtain somebody who is already trained.
That is why the phrase is so irritating.
It pretends to offer a beginning while quietly demanding that the beginning has already happened somewhere else.
The generational divide
There is a generational divide running through this conversation, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
Older people often talk about work as though employment is still a straightforward exchange: leave school, walk into a workplace, prove that you are willing to work and gradually build a stable life. The story usually includes a first job that required little experience, a wage that could cover ordinary living costs and an employer who was prepared to train somebody because that was simply how employment worked.
That is not the labour market young people are entering now.
The Resolution Foundation has reported that young people’s earnings have been unusually weak compared with previous generations, while the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that millennials have faced lower earnings and slower wealth accumulation than earlier generations at the same age. The Office for National Statistics reports that young people continue to face higher unemployment rates than older working-age groups, even when they are actively looking for work.
The Resolution Foundation has also described the deterioration of the early-career labour market: young workers are more likely to be concentrated in low-paid, insecure and temporary employment, while the routes into stable work have become less reliable.
At the same time, older workers are not necessarily being treated fairly either. The Centre for Ageing Better has found that older workers face age discrimination in recruitment, including assumptions that they are less adaptable, less comfortable with technology or too expensive to employ.
So the divide is not as simple as young people being excluded while older people are universally protected. Employers can discriminate in both directions. A young applicant may be treated as inexperienced, unreliable or entitled. An older applicant may be treated as inflexible, overqualified or close to retirement.
The difference is that older generations are often the ones setting the rules and then criticising young people for failing to succeed under conditions they did not face themselves.
A person who entered work when employers trained beginners cannot always understand why a twenty-one-year-old with qualifications and practical experience is still being rejected for not having already held the job they are applying for.
A person who bought a home when wages went further cannot always understand why young people are reluctant to accept unpaid internships, unstable hours or a minimum-wage job that does not cover rent and transport.
A person who remembers being told to “start at the bottom” may not notice that the bottom has become a permanent condition for many people rather than a temporary first step.
And when older people are hired into senior positions, they are often treated as experienced. When young people apply for junior positions, they are treated as risks.
That is the contradiction.
We are told that we have no experience, while being denied the opportunity to acquire it. We are told that we are overqualified, while being offered work that does not use our skills. We are told that we should accept anything, while older generations describe the jobs they had as though those jobs still exist in the same form.
The statistics do not prove that every older person is prejudiced or that every young person is being treated unfairly in every workplace. They do show that age matters in employment, and that the disadvantages are not distributed evenly.
Young people are more likely to be concentrated in insecure, low-paid and temporary work. Older people are more likely to hold senior positions and have longer employment histories. Employers can then use those employment histories as evidence that older applicants are safer choices, while treating young applicants’ lack of history as evidence that they are not ready.
It becomes a self-fulfilling system.
Older workers are experienced because they were given opportunities to become experienced. Young workers are inexperienced because they are denied opportunities until they are experienced.
Then politicians call the young workers lazy.
Gen Z is not refusing work
There is a difference between refusing work and refusing to pretend that every job is suitable.
Gen Z is not a generation of people sitting at home waiting for a perfect office, a six-figure salary and a personal assistant. We are applying for jobs. We are completing assessments. We are rewriting CVs. We are attending interviews. We are trying to work out how to describe the only experience we have — experience that exists off a CV rather than under a previous employer’s logo — in the language of employers who only seem to recognise experience when it comes with a formal employment history attached.
The Youth Employment UK Good Youth Employment Charter identifies meaningful work, fair pay, accessible recruitment and opportunities for development as important parts of good youth employment. Those are not extravagant demands. They are the minimum conditions under which “get a job” becomes useful advice rather than a slogan.
Yet young people are routinely told that asking for training is entitlement, asking about progression is impatience and asking for a wage that covers transport is unrealistic.
We are expected to be grateful for unpaid experience, grateful for zero-hours work, grateful for temporary contracts and grateful for employers who describe basic legal rights as benefits.
Then, when we decline an arrangement that is financially impossible or physically unsustainable, somebody says we do not want to work.
No. We do not want to be exploited.
Those are different statements.
The refusal to hire Gen Z often hides behind the language of “culture fit”. It means the applicant is too young, too direct, too unfamiliar with workplace rituals or insufficiently willing to perform enthusiasm for a job that offers no security.
It hides behind “professionalism”, which can mean anything from writing a clear email to pretending that a badly managed workplace is a wonderful opportunity.
It hides behind “resilience”, which increasingly means tolerating low pay, poor management, inaccessible systems and the expectation that a young worker should absorb every problem without complaint.
It hides behind “commitment”, which can mean accepting a job that offers no training, no stability and no reason to believe the employer is committed to you.
Gen Z is not refusing to work. The job market is refusing to treat us as people worth training.
Fine. What about something outside IT?
The obvious answer is to widen the search.
I am a software developer. That is still what I want to do professionally. I have years of open-source work behind me, I have an OCR Cambridge Technicals Level 3 Diploma in Information Technology, and I have built enough software at this point that GitHub has become less of a portfolio and more of an archaeological site.
But I also need a job, and those two statements can coexist.
So I started looking outside IT as well: administration, customer service, office work, reception, public sector jobs, NHS administration, finance and insurance operations. Anything where the important parts of the job are communicating, organising information, using a computer, learning systems and generally being capable of functioning in an office.
I can do those things quite well, actually.
The diploma does not evaporate because the computer in front of me is running Microsoft Excel instead of a C compiler.
The problem is that widening the search only works so far.
Every new category of job brings its own version of the same problem. The job is “entry level”, but they want experience. The job is “trainee”, but they want confidence with three systems I have never encountered. The job is “junior”, but the successful candidate will apparently be expected to arrive already knowing how the organisation works.
At some point, “get the qualifications and you’ll get snapped up” starts to sound less like advice and more like a practical joke that has gone on for too long.
The advice is especially absurd when directed at Gen Z by people who benefited from a labour market that was more willing to train beginners. We are told to follow the same route they followed, then rejected because the route no longer leads anywhere.
Get educated.
Get experience.
Get a job.
Except the job requires experience, the experience requires a job and the education is treated as proof that we are either too young or too qualified.
That is not a failure of young people to understand the system. It is a system that has stopped making sense.
The job market’s answer is apparently manual labour
What makes this more irritating is the way work is discussed.
Whenever unemployment, welfare or people who are supposedly “economically inactive” come up, the answer often seems to be presented as though the main problem is that everyone is refusing to do manual labour.
The implication is always that there are jobs everywhere, young people are simply unwilling to take them and disabled people are somehow choosing not to participate in society.
The solution, apparently, is to push people towards whatever vacancies happen to exist rather than asking whether those jobs are suitable, sustainable or remotely connected to their abilities.
There is a place for discussing labour shortages. There is a place for discussing training. There is a place for discussing how people who want work can get support finding it.
But “there are vacancies” is not the same thing as “there is a suitable job I can physically do, with reasonable conditions, at a sustainable level of pay, and an employer willing to take me on”.
The job market’s preferred solution often seems to be:
- 1.
Find a warehouse.
- 2.
Find a care job.
- 3.
Find a construction job.
- 4.
Stop complaining.
This is not a serious employment strategy for everybody.
It is especially not a serious employment strategy for disabled people, people with chronic illnesses or people whose skills and qualifications point towards office-based or technical work rather than manual labour.
The Office for National Statistics reports that disabled people have a lower employment rate than non-disabled people, but that statistic does not mean the solution is to push every disabled person towards the first physically demanding vacancy available.
It means the barriers to suitable work need to be taken seriously.
Apparently that is a more complicated employment strategy than telling people to stack shelves.
And the same principle applies to young people. A vacancy is not automatically an opportunity simply because an employer has failed to fill it.
If a job offers unpredictable hours, no training, no progression, no reasonable adjustments and wages that disappear into transport costs, then young people are not irrational for asking whether accepting it would improve their lives.
The Living Wage Foundation’s research on low pay makes the basic point that wages matter because work does not exist in isolation from rent, food, transport and energy. A job that leaves somebody unable to afford the cost of attending it is not a solution to unemployment. It is a transfer of costs from the employer to the worker.
But politicians and employers often treat any refusal as proof of laziness.
They do not ask whether employers are offering enough pay.
They do not ask whether recruitment processes are accessible.
They do not ask whether young workers are being trained.
They ask why young people are not grateful.
Thank you, Andy Burnham
This is where Andy Burnham’s comments become particularly difficult to ignore.
Thank you, Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for comments that were widely reported as criticising young people who are not in work, education or training, and for presenting the issue in a way that risks treating unemployment as a personal failing rather than a problem with multiple causes.
I understand the political appeal. Tell people that work is available. Tell them that the country needs them. Tell them that they should stop waiting for the perfect opportunity and take responsibility for their own future.
It sounds decisive.
It also ignores the people who are already trying.
It ignores the young people applying for jobs that demand experience they have not had the opportunity to acquire. It ignores the disabled people who cannot simply walk into a warehouse and perform manual labour indefinitely. It ignores the people whose health, transport, caring responsibilities or qualifications limit which jobs are actually realistic.
Most importantly, it turns a structural problem into a moral accusation.
If we are unemployed, we must be lazy.
If we cannot take a physically demanding job, we must be making excuses.
If we ask for reasonable adjustments, we must be difficult.
If we want work that matches our skills, we must be entitled.
If we ask for training, we must be unprepared.
If we refuse an exploitative job, we must be unwilling.
That is not encouragement. It is prejudice dressed up as policy.
And no, we are not lazy.
The job market is failing to provide enough suitable, accessible and fairly paid opportunities, while employers are often unwilling to train people at the beginning of their careers.
The refusal is visible in the contradiction between what employers say they want and what they are willing to provide. They want young workers who are adaptable, digitally literate, enthusiastic and capable of learning. They also want those workers to have already learned everything, already demonstrated loyalty and already developed the confidence that only comes from being given a chance.
They want the benefits of hiring Gen Z without accepting the responsibility of employing people at the beginning of their careers.
They want experienced workers at beginner prices.
They want flexibility without offering security.
They want commitment without making any commitment themselves.
Then they blame us for noticing.
No, I cannot just work in a warehouse
There is a particular piece of employment advice that makes perfect sense until disability enters the room: just get any job.
Retail. Warehouse. Hospitality. Stockroom. Delivery work. Kitchen work.
Get your foot in the door. Get some experience. Do something physical for a while and move on later.
I cannot do manual labour.
This is not me saying I am above it. It is not me being picky. It is not me refusing perfectly good work because I consider myself too qualified to stack shelves.
I am disabled.
There are physical jobs my body is simply not capable of doing sustainably, and pretending otherwise would be an extremely stupid way to prove how employable I am.
I have written about this before. Chronic means chronic. My body does not become temporarily non-disabled because a supermarket has an opening.
And this is where “just get any job” starts to fall apart.
There is no any job. There is a subset of jobs I can physically do, then a subset of those that are actually entry level, then a subset which don’t require prior experience.
After that, there are the ones whose hours work, the ones still accepting applications and, finally, the ones where somebody decides my CV is worth moving from one pile to another.
The pool gets small remarkably quickly.
The search also gets exhausting remarkably quickly. Every application asks for the same information in a slightly different format. Every employer wants a tailored statement explaining why I am uniquely passionate about the opportunity to perform tasks I could have described in one sentence. Every rejection arrives with either no explanation or a sentence so generic it may as well have been generated by a printer.
Eventually, even opening a job board starts to feel like volunteering for another small administrative punishment.
And that exhaustion is beginning to turn into burnout.
I am not merely annoyed by the search anymore. I am getting burnt out by it. The constant applications, repeated forms, tailored statements, assessments, waiting and rejection are consuming the energy I have available before I have even reached a workplace.
I am spending so much effort trying to prove that I can work that I am increasingly struggling to preserve the energy required to keep applying.
That is a particularly vicious loop. The more exhausted I become, the harder it is to write another application. The harder it is to write another application, the fewer opportunities I can pursue. The fewer opportunities I pursue, the easier it becomes for somebody to look at the outcome and decide that I am not trying hard enough.
Burnout does not mean I have stopped wanting a job.
It means the process of trying to obtain one is becoming unsustainable.
And the advice to “take anything” ignores the fact that Gen Z is often being asked to take jobs that are not stepping stones at all. They are dead ends with probation periods.
A first job should provide some combination of income, experience, training, contacts, confidence or progression. It does not need to be perfect. It does need to lead somewhere.
If an employer wants a young person to accept low pay, unstable hours and no training, then the employer is not offering a first step. They are asking somebody to absorb the risk of a business model that does not work.
That is not laziness.
That is recognising a bad deal.
The stupid thing is that I can work
This is probably the part that frustrates me most.
I can work, and I know I can work because I already do. Nobody pays me for most of it, which is apparently the crucial technical distinction.
I maintain software. I manage repositories. I write documentation. I investigate bugs. I deal with users. I run infrastructure. I plan projects. I read specifications written by people who apparently consider punctuation an optional extension to the English language and turn them into functioning implementations.
I have spent hours debugging problems where the eventual answer was hidden three abstractions below the thing that appeared broken. I have built things because somebody needed them, and maintained things after the fun part of building them was over.
I can sit at a computer and concentrate on something complicated until it works.
Apparently the difficult part is convincing somebody to exchange currency for this behaviour.
And outside IT, much of the same underlying ability still applies.
An administrative employer doesn’t need me to implement an AT Protocol repository. Fair enough. It would be slightly concerning if a council did.
But they might need somebody who can learn an internal system quickly, keep accurate records, communicate clearly, solve small problems without panicking and understand that pressing random buttons until the error disappears is generally not a robust operational procedure.
Hello. I exist.
The problem is that unpaid work, self-directed work and open-source work often seem to count only when an employer wants to use them as evidence that I should do more unpaid work.
It is experience when somebody wants a favour. It is a hobby when I want a salary.
That is another way Gen Z is refused employment. We are told that we need to build a portfolio, so we build one. We are told to demonstrate initiative, so we do. We are told to learn outside formal education, so we spend evenings and weekends teaching ourselves.
Then an employer looks at the result and says it does not count because nobody paid us to do it.
The work is real enough to prove that we are useful, but not real enough to justify hiring us.
The over-qualification crisis
There is another part of this that is difficult to explain without sounding as though I am complaining about having qualifications.
I am not complaining about having qualifications. I worked for them, and I am glad I have them.
But there is a growing gap between what people are told education will do for them and what employers actually seem willing to offer afterwards.
You can be qualified for work and still not have the experience employers want. You can have experience in the work you have created for yourself and still not have the employment history an application form recognises. You can be over-qualified for the jobs that are available and under-experienced for the jobs you actually want.
That is a particularly stupid place to be.
I have a Level 3 qualification in IT and years of practical experience building software. I am not expecting a senior engineering role. I am not applying to be the chief technology officer of a multinational corporation.
I am applying for junior roles and getting asked whether I have already done junior roles.
At the same time, if I apply for something less technical, there is always the possibility that an employer sees the IT background and decides I will leave as soon as something better appears.
That is one of the traps of being overqualified. The qualification is evidence that I can learn, but it can also be treated as evidence that I am not committed to the job being advertised. Employers can decide that I am either not qualified enough for the role I want or too qualified for the role they have available.
So the qualification is simultaneously not enough and potentially too much.
Wonderful.
And there is a further problem with calling this a personal failure. I did what people told me to do. I learned skills. I completed a recognised qualification. I built a portfolio. I kept working when nobody was paying me. I made myself useful.
The reward for that is not necessarily a job at the level of my ability. Sometimes it is being told that I need more experience. Sometimes it is being considered a flight risk for an administrative role. Sometimes it is being offered work that does not use my skills and would not be physically sustainable anyway.
This is not a lack of effort. It is a labour market that has become very good at extracting preparation from people while making no corresponding promise that there will be a place for them afterwards.
The promise was supposed to be simple: get the qualifications, learn the skills, work hard and employers will notice.
Instead, I have qualifications, skills and a growing collection of application confirmations.
The first three were apparently not the important part.
The refusal to hire Gen Z is particularly obvious here because we are being told that education is both essential and worthless. We must obtain qualifications to prove that we are serious, but qualifications do not count as experience. We must gain experience, but employers will not provide it. We must show commitment, but employers will not offer enough stability for commitment to be rational.
We are being asked to solve a problem that the labour market created.
Disability is not a footnote
There is also a danger in describing this as an over-qualification problem without mentioning disability.
My disability is not an unrelated detail that can be placed in a separate paragraph after the employment discussion. It changes the entire calculation.
It changes which jobs I can apply for, how long I can work, under what conditions and with what adjustments. It changes how much energy I have left after dealing with the ordinary administrative nonsense of applying for jobs.
It changes how an employer may read my CV, my gaps, my availability and my need for flexibility. It also changes how I am perceived before I have even had the chance to demonstrate what I can do.
The Equality Act 2010 is supposed to protect disabled people from discrimination and requires reasonable adjustments in many employment situations. The Office for National Statistics’ labour-market data shows that disabled people continue to have lower employment rates and a disability employment gap.
Those facts are important, but they can also make the problem sound more distant than it is. “Disabled people have a lower employment rate” is a clean sentence. The lived version is that an employer may see the word “disabled” and start calculating inconvenience before they have calculated ability.
Will I need time off? Will I be reliable? Will adjustments cost money? Will I be difficult? Will I be able to keep up? Will I be a problem?
They may never say any of that out loud. They may not even consciously think it. They can simply decide that another candidate feels safer, easier or more normal.
That is how discrimination often works. It does not need a cartoon villain announcing that disabled people are second-class citizens. It can happen through assumptions, risk aversion, inaccessible recruitment processes, inflexible working practices and the quiet preference for somebody whose body is treated as the default.
I am not normal by the standards society has decided to build around.
I was born like this. I did not make a lifestyle choice to become disabled. I did not fail to maintain the correct body. I did not opt out of the standard human template and then ask everyone else to accommodate my eccentricity.
I was simply born with a body and brain that do not fit what most workplaces are designed around.
Because of that, I can be treated as though I am less capable, less dependable or less deserving before I have done anything wrong.
That is the part that makes the language of “personal responsibility” so insulting. I am expected to prove that I am willing to work, while employers and the wider labour market are often allowed to assume that my disability makes me a worse bet. I am expected to be grateful for any opportunity, while the opportunity itself may be designed around somebody else’s body.
I am not asking to be treated as inspirational. I am not asking to be treated as fragile. I am asking to be treated as a person who may have useful skills and may need reasonable adjustments. Those are not mutually exclusive facts.
And disability can make the generational refusal even worse. A young disabled applicant is not merely treated as inexperienced. They may be treated as inexperienced and risky. They may be assumed to need more support, more time, more absence and more accommodation before they have even been asked what they need.
The employer sees a list of possible problems.
They do not see the years I have already spent solving problems.
They see a young person who might need adjustments.
They do not see a young person who has already learned how to adapt every part of daily life around a body that does not cooperate.
They see a cost.
They do not see a colleague.
That is ableism, and it does not become less ableist because it is expressed through a polite rejection email.
“No job yet”
I wrote that I was four months out from brain surgery, two months out of college and still didn’t have a job.
At the time I was trying to disentangle that last sentence from the shame people attach to it.
I still don’t think unemployment is a measure of somebody’s worth. I still don’t think not having an employer means you are doing nothing. I still don’t think productivity is the purpose of a human life.
All of that remains true.
I would also really fucking like a job.
Those positions are not contradictory either.
There is a temptation when talking about unemployment to turn everything into a moral argument. Either you have to perform optimism — my time will come, everything happens for a reason! — or you have to collapse into the opposite position where every rejection becomes evidence that you are useless and society has reached its final judgement.
I don’t think either is particularly helpful.
I am employable. I am also unemployed. That’s the situation.
I don’t need to convert it into a statement about my intrinsic worth before I’m allowed to find it irritating.
I also don’t need to pretend that the situation is neutral. Being disabled means I am entering a labour market where the available work is already narrower, the recruitment process may already be less accessible and the assumptions made about me may already be worse.
I am not starting from the same position as somebody whose body is treated as normal by default.
That does not mean I am incapable. It means the race is not being run on a level track.
And I am tired of being told that the answer is to run faster.
I am also tired of being told that my generation is failing because we have not reproduced the employment histories of people who were given opportunities we are being denied.
A twenty-one-year-old cannot have ten years of experience.
A recent graduate cannot have spent years progressing through an industry they have only just entered.
A young disabled person cannot prove that an employer’s assumptions are wrong without first being allowed into the workplace.
These are not personal shortcomings. They are basic facts.
Please allow me to acquire the experience
The most annoying thing about being at the beginning of a working life is that somebody eventually has to be first.
Some employer has to look at a person who hasn’t previously been employed in that exact capacity and conclude that they could probably learn.
This is apparently considered a daring experimental recruitment strategy.
I understand why experience is attractive. Obviously.
If I were bringing somebody onto one of my own software projects, somebody who already understood Git would require less explanation than somebody who had never seen a repository before.
But there has to be a point at which can learn this counts for something.
Otherwise an entry-level labour market that constantly asks for previous experience becomes a closed loop.
You need a job to demonstrate that you can have a job. You need experience to get the job that gives you experience. You need somebody to have hired you before somebody will hire you.
And if you are disabled, you may also need somebody to decide that your disability does not outweigh your ability before you are even allowed to demonstrate either.
You need an employer to recognise self-directed work as experience, qualifications as evidence of ability and adjustments as ordinary parts of employment rather than special favours.
Excellent system. No notes. Certified as “not an ouroboros.”
The refusal to hire Gen Z is the refusal to be the first employer. Everybody wants somebody else to take the risk of training us. Everybody wants a candidate who has already been shaped by another organisation, already taught the systems, already made the beginner mistakes somewhere else and already learned how to behave in a workplace.
They want the finished product without paying for the manufacturing process.
So I keep applying
There isn’t a grand conclusion to this one.
I don’t have a triumphant paragraph where I reveal that halfway through writing this somebody rang and offered me £30,000 a year.
Would have been convenient.
I’m still looking.
I’m looking at software jobs, administrative jobs and customer service jobs that are actually desk based. I’m looking at public-sector roles, NHS roles, office apprenticeships and whatever else falls into the intersection between I can do this, my body can do this, and they might actually hire somebody at the beginning of their career.
That intersection exists. It is just considerably more annoying to find than I would like.
A couple of months ago I stood in the metaphorical hallway after education ended and wondered what came next.
I suppose this is what came next: refreshing job boards, rewriting the same handful of facts about myself into whatever shape an application form wants this time and reading “entry level” before scrolling down to discover what exciting new definition of entry we are using today.
I am watching politicians talk about work as though the only meaningful jobs are the ones that involve lifting, carrying, standing or wearing a high-visibility vest. I am watching them describe young people as though we are a generation of layabouts who need to be bullied into employment.
I am watching employers ask for experience, confidence, flexibility and commitment from people they have no intention of training, supporting or retaining.
I am watching Gen Z be blamed for a labour market that refuses to let us begin.
I am trying to work out whether an employer will see my qualifications as evidence that I can contribute or evidence that I will leave.
I am trying to work out whether disclosing my disability will allow me to ask for adjustments or simply give somebody another reason to reject me quietly.
I am trying not to interpret silence as judgement, and trying not to interpret rejection as judgement either.
I am also trying not to let the process turn me into somebody who believes every application has to be a referendum on my worth.
That is becoming harder when the search itself is starting to consume the energy I would otherwise use to do the work I am supposedly trying to convince people I can do.
I am getting burnt out.
Not because I do not want to work, but because I have been working constantly at trying to become employable, trying to demonstrate that I am employable and trying to persuade employers to recognise the work I have already done.
There is only so much energy available for applications that disappear into automated systems, assessments that lead nowhere and rejection emails that do not explain what I was missing.
Burnout is not proof that I am lazy. It is not proof that I have given up. It is what happens when the process demands sustained effort without providing any meaningful indication that the effort is leading anywhere.
I am continuing anyway, because there isn’t really another clever answer.
But continuing does not mean this is easy, sustainable or harmless.
I can work. I want to work. I am not refusing work because I am too qualified, too disabled or too precious to do it.
I am trying to find work that exists at the intersection of my skills, my qualifications and what my body can actually sustain.
I am trying to find an employer who can see a disabled person as a person rather than a liability, and a qualified person as a potential colleague rather than a threat to their staff retention figures.
I am trying to find an employer who understands that hiring somebody young is not charity. It is how every experienced worker became experienced.
At some point, somebody has to be the first person to hire me.
It would be nice if they hurried the fuck up.
And while they are taking their time, perhaps politicians could stop calling us lazy for noticing that the system is designed to reject us.
Perhaps employers could stop demanding that Gen Z prove we are worth hiring before they have given us the chance to prove it.
Perhaps “entry level” could mean what it says. It is the doorstep, not the rooftop.
Perhaps the people telling us to work harder could acknowledge that some of us are already working as hard as we can, and that the problem is not a lack of effort but the fact that effort is not an infinite resource.