Youth unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in nearly six years. While on the
face of it this is good news for the economy, what are the implications for the
tourism and visitor economy sector given its reliance on a young workforce?
Young people are
popular with sector employers because they are often keen to learn, happy to
work flexible hours and can handle a physically demanding job. Currently, 33%
of the tourism and visitor economy’s workforce is under 25, which is three times
the rate across the population as a whole. This dependence on young people not
only poses current challenges given falling rates of youth unemployment, but demographic
changes also mean that there will be fewer young people in the UK population to
target in the future. Recent research from the
European Commission suggests the UK’s workforce growth will turn negative by 2023.1
With the sector’s
main recruitment pool shrinking can we realistically meet our future
recruitment needs? In all likelihood we can’t; by 2020, the tourism and visitor
economy is projected to recruit a further 843,000 employees. Sector employers
are already reporting hard-to-fill-vacancies for front facing, operational
roles that young people typically fill and if it weren’t for migrant workers
(see August’s Research Insight report),
we would likely have a major recruitment problem.
Tourism and
visitor economy businesses need to broaden their recruitment pools – older
workers and women returning to work being two good starting points. Yet we need
to focus much more on retaining the young people we attract in the first place.
Most employers have a good story to tell about a young person that fell into
the sector after working casually in their business, yet it is surprising that
more businesses don’t promote the career pathways and broader opportunities
that can be found in the sector to those working casually for them.
With falling
youth unemployment, some social commentators have expressed concern about the
quality of jobs that young people are filling and whether this is beneficial
for the economy as a whole. In reality, many of these jobs, which are lower
paid, part-time work, are found in our sector. However, at the same time, we
need to fill a significant number of skilled and management positions. If
filled these types of roles would be likely to lift productivity, which would
benefit individual businesses and the economy as a whole. So there is a real
incentive to retain young people.
Falling
unemployment is not necessarily bad news for the sector and while it would be
tempting to call for a renewed careers assault, I think it would pay greater dividends
to look afresh at whether we are doing all we can to retain the young people we
attract in the first place.
[1] Growth
potential of EU human resources and policy implications for future economic
growth, (2013), European Commission
