Youth Work

‘WHILE marketers, advertisers and Tony Blairs love tapping into youth culture, those already in it know it to be a morass of pimple-pricking, sweating, fretting, hormone-driven angst.

‘Smack da bitch up, innit’

So any jobseeker wishing to be seen as young has to do more than turn their baseball cap so the brim is pointing at a right angle to the face and get real.

To fool the one in three employers who, as a survey by a recruitment firm now published in the Telegraph reveals, believe a candidate has lied about their age requires more effort.

The two out of ten jobseekers who claim they had been rejected from a job purely because of their age should not write a polite letter of complaint but lean over the interviewer’s desk and demand some ‘respect, innit’ from the ‘ho’ working for the ‘man’.

But they should not overdo things because the Telegraph goes onto say in another piece that things ‘yoof’ are not desirable per se.

The proliferation of text messaging, street slang and an impoverished education system means that many yoofs are now ‘virtually unemployable’.

Not that being labelled so would upset many yoofs, given that the tag ‘unemployable’ will, most likely, be worn with some pride.

After all, David Beckham don’t speak well English and ‘e’s done not too bad at all, if you know what we mean, type of fing.

But Ivan Lewis, speaking in the Guardian, is unimpressed. The minister for skills and education says that the drive to equip young people with the skills to get on in life is being hampered by a culture which says they can get become rich and famous without much by way of qualifications.

Despite a welter of evidence to the contrary (Kerry McPadding, Posh, Jordan, John Major, the aforesaid Beckham and many, many more), Lewis is adamant that this is a false premise and things must change.

‘We cannot be satisfied when nearly 50 per cent of youngsters leave school without five good GCSEs,’ he says. ‘That is a massive indictment of the system.’

So the remedy, says Lewis, is an overhaul in vocational qualifications.

So look out for GCSEs being offered in Reality TV, Jungle Survival, Nipple Flashing, Botox, Spot Bursting and Teenage Pregnancy.

Oh, and Call Centres.’

Posted: 11th, March 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink