The Broken Handoff

There is a moment somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five when an extraordinary institutional transition happens.

For most of childhood, somebody is responsible for your progress.

There is a syllabus.

A timetable.

A teacher.

A parent.

A grade level.

Someone notices when you do not attend.

Someone decides what you are supposed to learn next.

Then, surprisingly quickly, much of that architecture disappears.

You are supposed to find work.

The problem is that no institution clearly owns the handoff.

Schools can say their responsibility is education rather than employment.

Universities can say they provide knowledge, not jobs.

Employers can say applicants should arrive job-ready.

Governments build skills programmes.

Families offer advice based on labour markets they experienced twenty or thirty years earlier.

The young person stands in the middle trying to translate one system into another.

Globally, that transition is already difficult enough to appear clearly in the labour statistics.

About 20 per cent of young people were not in employment, education or training in 2023. Two-thirds of them were women. Youth unemployment stood at 13 per cent, its lowest level in fifteen years, which is genuine progress, but the headline hides enormous regional differences and says little about the security or quality of the jobs young people enter.¹

In low-income countries, unemployment can even be a misleading measure of opportunity because many young people cannot afford to remain unemployed.

They work, but often informally or insecurely.

The ILO estimates that a young adult aged 25 to 29 in a low-income country is at least three times as likely to find only insecure work as someone of the same age in a high-income country. Three in four young workers in sub-Saharan Africa lack secure work.¹

Meanwhile, the education side has expanded.

That is good news.

More young people spend longer in school and training than previous generations did. The ILO estimates that the share of 15-to-24-year-olds in schooling or training rose globally from 38 per cent in 2000 to 48 per cent in 2023.²

But expanding one side of the bridge without expanding the other creates its own problem.

The ILO finds substantial educational mismatch in developing economies. Two in three young adult workers there hold qualifications that do not match their jobs well.¹

This is not an argument against education.

It is an argument against assuming that the labour market automatically converts education into opportunity.

The handoff involves things neither side consistently teaches.

How do you understand what a job actually involves before choosing a degree?

How do you demonstrate ability when you have never had a job?

How do you acquire professional norms?

How do you negotiate?

How do you recover after rejection?

How do you distinguish a bad first job from a useful difficult one?

How do you build relationships with adults who are neither teachers nor family?

These things are often described as "soft skills", which has always seemed a strange phrase.

For someone trying to build an adult life, they are rather hard.

The transition is becoming more complicated as jobs themselves change faster.

Employers surveyed for the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 expected 39 per cent of workers' core skills to change by 2030. AI and big data are among the fastest-growing skills, but so are creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning.³

So the destination is moving while young people are crossing the bridge.

The obvious policy response has been "skills".

Teach more coding.

More AI.

More vocational education.

More employability.

Some of that is necessary.

But I wonder whether we have framed the problem too narrowly.

The difficult part of early adulthood is not simply acquiring a list of skills.

It is learning how to navigate a world in which the requirements keep changing.

That suggests the handoff needs to be less like graduation and more like apprenticeship.

Young people need repeated contact with real work before education ends.

Employers need meaningful ways of taking chances on people without prior experience.

Schools need career exploration that goes beyond asking a fourteen-year-old which profession they want.

Universities need to treat the transition into work as part of the educational journey rather than an optional placement-office service.

And employers need to accept something uncomfortable.

An entry-level worker is, by definition, unfinished.

The demand for "job-ready" graduates sometimes sounds like an employer asking the education system to absorb the entire cost of training their workforce.

Young people pay the price when neither side accepts responsibility.

The broken handoff also explains why advice from adults can feel increasingly unsatisfying.

"Study hard."

"Get a degree."

"Learn to code."

"Build your network."

"Use AI."

Each may be sensible.

None is a reliable map.

Maybe what young people need from us is not another promise that following the correct sequence will make everything work.

Maybe they need institutions that stay with them slightly longer while they learn how uncertain the sequence actually is.

We have built enormous systems to prepare young people for the future.

Then, at the exact moment the future begins, we often tell them to figure it out.