College graduates are stepping out of university and into an uncertain labor market—but the U.K.’s chief of the defense staff says the government’s defense department is ready to employ them with open arms.
While warning the nation of the escalating potential of conflict with Russia, Sir Richard Knighton stressed that the U.K.’s defense “cannot be outsourced to the armed forces,” and called on young citizens to step up.
He went as far as urging teenagers and graduates to ditch the corporate careers they may have been studying for, to join the military and help “meet the demands in the U.K. and of our allies to restock and rearm.”
“Building this industrial capacity also means we need more people who leave schools and universities to join that industry,” Knighton said recently at a Royal United Services Institute event in Westminster.
The head of the military even asked parents to actively steer their children toward careers in defense.
“We need defense and political leaders to explain the importance of the industry to the nation, and we need schools and parents to encourage children and young adults to take up careers in the industry.”
More than a rally call: The government will target Gen Z with $66.7 million initiative
Asking Gen Zers to do a career-180 and enter the arms industry is a tall order—but the U.K. government is putting its money where its mouth is. The nation is rolling out a new initiative to train teenagers as young as 16 in military technology.
Citing a recent report that found that the U.K. has a “perilous skills gap” in engineering, Knighton acknowledged a critical need to collaborate with the industry and budding Gen Z professionals.
He announced that the U.K. government will invest £50 million ($66.7 million) into new defense technical excellence colleges (TECs).
It’s an intentional strategy to not only develop in-demand skills domestically, but also ensure that graduates have a better shot at employment—a much-needed opportunity as the country grapples with alarming Gen Z joblessness.
The tough labor market for the U.K.’s Gen Z graduates
Ambitious Gen Z professionals are up against an incredibly weak labor market. The U.K.’s youth unemployment surged to the highest rate in over a decade, as the jobless rate among 16- to 24-year-olds climbed to 16% in the three months leading to October. It’s the highest rate of unemployed young people the country has seen since 2015, with 735,000 of these Gen Zers out of work.
Even those who attended college in pursuit of six-figure office jobs are having a rough go. It’s estimated that 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 U.K. graduate roles in 2023 and 2024, according to research from the Institute of Student Employers (ISE). Comparatively, 559,959 candidates were interviewed for graduate roles in 2021 and 2022, with U.K. employers hiring 19,646 of them. Within just a couple of years, these entry-level opportunities shrank by the thousands, while double the amount of talent entered the highly competitive job hunt. Last year marked the highest number of applications per job ever recorded since the ISE started tracking the data back in 1991.
“There are many graduates now that are coming out of universities, which means that there are more people that are graduating necessarily for the jobs that are there,” Rob Breare, CEO of independent U.K. school system Malvern College International, said onstage at the Fortune Global Forum in October.
As white-collar jobs are in short supply, the U.K. government’s push for more Gen Zers to enter the arms industry could be a welcome one.
The nation’s $66.7 million investment in specialty defense tech schools is just a drop in the bucket of its $965 million strategy to employ young professionals. Last week, the government announced a nearly billion-dollar initiative to create more apprenticeships and employ 50,000 young people in critical fields such as AI, engineering, and hospitality.
The country is rewriting the norm that a cushy office job is the only fail-safe career. And as the government looks to expand its defense capabilities and job opportunities, Gen Z could find greater success pivoting from the corporate job hunt.
