My New Book and Youth Unemployment

It is a sad fact that there are far too many young people unemployed in the UK. For a long time now I have felt that there are several reasons why young people are not getting jobs

• welfare state
• unrealistic ambitions
• poor education

Many young people who live at home are receiving unemployment and other benefits and they may well be satisfying: there is no drive for them to need work.

I talk to young people whose first ambition is to become a manager ... this is before they have any experience and, indeed, education, training and experience. Parents, teachers and others who discuss these matters with their young people need to convince them that starting at the bottom is the reality and not something that was fine in the old days ...

There is no doubt that young people are leaving school in the UK undereducated relative to a generation ago. The people who say, for example, that if someone can communicate, it doesn't matter whether they can spell and so on: complete tosh. This is a recipe for people to be trapped at the lower levels. After all, the average middle and senior manager in the UK needs good communication skills as they have to give speeches, write reports and so on. Mathematical abilities are nowhere near what they were: I have met 18 year olds who wanted to use a calculator to find the answer to the question, "What is 10 as a percentage of 100?"

New Case Study Book: a recipe for success

I believe there are, however, a lot of young people who should be encouraged to take hold of their lives and look after themselves. The book I am writing at the moment is a case study book: lots of examples of MSME businesses that even school and university leavers can take a look at and start. Many of the examples you can read about might even need no capital, or very little capital. One of the fascinating aspects of the cases is that most of them come from the Far East: the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia ... If you would like to see specimen examples from the book before it is published, just write to me at duncan_at_duncanwil_dot_co_dot_uk with Specimen Cases Please as the subject and I will send you three examples from the book free of charge.

DW