What does falling youth employment mean for the tourism and visitor economy?

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