The Budget’s new £3,000 Youth Jobs Grant will only work if young people can find their way through the application in the first place, says Anna Mbwese, co-founder of free careers platform Shine, whose early pilot findings show that many of the young people it meets were already outside education and work and had never been shown how to take that first step.
In Shine’s survey of 26 of the 500+ young people on the platform, almost 50% said they are NEET, and the barriers they named most often were having no experience or professional contacts and simply not knowing where to start, with others saying they had no CV or didn’t know how to make one. All of the young people who answered after submitting an application said that before Shine they either wouldn’t have known how to apply, and when asked what had almost stopped them, the most common answer was worry about the CV or cover letter. The national picture shows why this matters, because 981,000 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK were NEET in April to June 2026, 13.0% of the age group and up 30,000 on a year earlier (ONS, 27 August 2026), while youth unemployment stood at 15.6% in June to August 2026 (ONS, 20 October 2026).
The Autumn Budget on 28 October confirmed a £3,000 Youth Jobs Grant for businesses hiring eligible young unemployed people, extended the Jobs Guarantee to 22 to 24-year-olds and set out a £2,000 payment for smaller employers taking on young apprentices, while Alan Milburn’s interim review of young people and work put the cost of youth inactivity at £125 billion a year. The next official NEET figures are soon to be published on 26 November.
Anna Mbwese, co-founder of Shine, said:
“We can fund jobs for young people, but if nobody has ever shown them how to find one, write a CV or answer an application question, many will never make it through the door. We spoke to over 3000 young people at careers fairs when researching and building this platform, and the young people I met weren’t lacking ambition so much as early enough advice to build experience in time towards a competitive application.”
“Shine, which launched in June 2026, is built around giving that structured insight into what options there are, personalised to the young person, and how to build a competitive application. Young people take a free careers questionnaire, receive a CareerMap of experiences and training that suits them and will increase the success rate of their applications, build a CV and are matched to relevant entry-level jobs and apprenticeships. It also flags early warning signs to schools, such as a young person with no plan for what comes next, low confidence, a practical barrier like transport or money, so that schools, colleges and councils can step in and support before someone drifts out of view.