Half Our Young People Don’t Know What Future They’re Walking Into

New research from the CDI reveals a generation in crisis over the world of work, and puts FE professionals at the centre of the solution.

Here is a number that should stop every further education professional in their tracks: 46.4% of 15-year-olds in the UK are uncertain about their career options. Not slightly unsure. Genuinely uncertain. That is up from 24.6% in 2018, which means we have nearly halved young people’s confidence in their career futures in under a decade. Out of 80 countries surveyed, the UK sits near the bottom of the table.

For those working in further education, this is not an abstract statistic. It’s the young person sitting in front of you who doesn’t know why they enrolled, isn’t sure what the course leads to, and can’t picture what their working life might look like. It’s a crisis of aspiration, information, and confidence, and FE is uniquely placed to help address it.

The world they are entering is genuinely hard

Let’s not pretend otherwise. The labour market this generation is stepping into is rough terrain. According to TUC data, 4 million people in the UK, one in eight workers, are currently in insecure employment. Zero-hours contracts. Bogus self-employment. Pay too low to meet basic needs. The Employment Rights Act 2025 represents the most significant legislative push for worker protections in a generation, but legislation only helps those who know their rights and can navigate their options.

Automation and AI are adding further pressure. Roughly 28% of jobs in OECD countries are at high risk of displacement. The young people in FE today are being trained for roles that, in some cases, may look radically different within a decade. And yet research shows that half of young people are funnelling their aspirations into just ten high-status professions, a dangerous narrowing at exactly the moment when they need the broadest possible map of opportunity.

This is not just a careers adviser problem; it is an FE-wide challenge

Many FE providers are already rising to this challenge. For this generation, navigating decent work is best served by sustained, informed, and genuinely empowering career support woven through the fabric of the FE experience.

Research by CDI researcher Stephen Plimmer draws on international career development frameworks to show that career support works best when it engages with the reality of students’ lives, including the structural barriers, inequalities, and economic constraints that shape their options. That means not framing every obstacle as a personal failing. It means integrating mental health awareness into career conversations: precarious work and economic insecurity are significant drivers of anxiety and depression among young people, and FE sees that first-hand every day.

It means building career adaptability, the ability to respond to uncertainty rather than be paralysed by it. Constructivist and life design approaches offer FE practitioners powerful tools here: helping young people build a coherent sense of who they are and what they value, rather than simply matching a CV to a job listing.

What good FE career support looks like

Good FE career support is already happening across classrooms, tutorials, enrichment sessions, and employer encounters. At its best, it includes practitioners across the whole FE workforce, not only dedicated careers staff.

The hallmarks of that best practice are:

• Broadening aspirations beyond the famous ‘top ten’ professions by bringing diverse role models and real labour market information into the curriculum
• Building employment rights literacy, so students understand what decent work looks like – and what protections now exist under the Employment Rights Act 2025 – before they encounter the alternative
• Raising awareness of the risks associated with zero-hours contracts, gig work, and bogus self-employment, and how to spot them
• Actively promoting lifelong learning as a mindset, not a remedial measure – the students who thrive in the coming decade will be those who see change as navigable
• Integrating career conversations into curriculum design, so the link between what students study and where it can take them is explicit and visible

The CDI’s call to the FE sector

The CDI’s position is clear: career guidance is a core outcome, not an add-on, in any further education setting. The evidence is unambiguous, quality career support improves outcomes, narrows inequality, and builds the workforce that both individuals and the economy need. But realising that potential requires investment, training, and professional recognition from government and from institutions.

The Government’s Get Britain Working agenda and the Employment Rights Act 2025 have set the direction. Further education is where that direction meets real young lives. The sector has never been more important and professional career development and guidance within it has never been more urgent.

Half our young people are uncertain about their futures. With the right investment in career development across FE, we can change that.

Key Statistics Reference

By David Morgan, Chief Executive at the CDI and Stephen Plimmer, Research Manager at the CDI