Even though the UK’s unemployed youth have underexploited digital skills estimated to be worth about £6.7 billion, less than a quarter of employers plan to take them on despite a lack of in-house expertise.
According to a survey undertaken by mobile phone operator O2, although organisations expect to generate about a fifth of their revenues through digital channels over the next three years, they believe that only just over a third of their existing workforce is currently digitally savvy.
To make matters worse, just under half of employers have no plans to provide staff with any training in order to boost their skill levels, while 76% have no intention of offering a young person either work or on-the-job training over the months ahead.
O2’s chief executive Ronan Dunne said: “There are more than a million young people out of work. It’s a travesty that, whilst businesses are crying out for digital skills, they are excluding from the workplace the very people who have them.”
Employers needed to recognise the value that under-25s could bring as they were the “future fuel of the economy” and had the necessary skills to “help pull us out of recession”, he added.
When asked to identify which digital skills they would find most valuable, a fifth of employers mentioned web design and 12% pointed to e-marketing.
The survey also revealed that nine out of 10 young people believed that they could use social media to promote an event, idea or cause, while about two thirds felt able to design a web page and one in five to develop an app.
