Matthew Jeffery is one of Britain’s most experienced global talent and recruitment leaders, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
This is part 2 of Matthew’s short series on AI and the AI generation. You can read part 1 here.
After more than 25 years leading global talent acquisition, including overseeing 18,000+ hires at EY and now advising on AI-enabled, skills-based hiring, I have watched employers quietly lose confidence in academic signals and rebuild assessment from the ground up. The rules of hiring have changed. The shift to skills-based hiring is no longer experimental. It is becoming standard.
At its core, skills-based hiring replaces proxies with proof. Instead of assuming capability from degrees, job titles or years of experience, employers are testing what candidates can actually do. That means assessing how people approach problems, how they communicate, how they make decisions and how they perform in realistic scenarios that mirror the role itself.
In recent hiring processes, I have seen candidates with outstanding academic records struggle to demonstrate basic workplace capability, while others with less formal education outperform them immediately in applied tasks. The gap is no longer theoretical. It is visible in real hiring decisions.
Major employers are steadily removing degree requirements as they prioritise demonstrable capability over academic pedigree. LinkedIn data shows job advertisements without degree requirements rising sharply, while research from the Burning Glass Institute confirms the same trend across multiple sectors.
Large organisations have moved beyond credentials altogether, using their scale to redesign hiring around direct evidence of performance. Assessment is no longer about what candidates claim but what they can demonstrate through simulations, work samples and scenario-based tasks that reveal how they think and operate in practice.
The same shift is happening inside organisations. Internal talent marketplaces are increasingly matching employees to projects and roles based on verified skills rather than job titles or formal qualifications. Work is being broken into tasks and capability is being matched to need in real time. Alongside this, employers are building internal academies and reskilling programmes to create capabilities they cannot reliably hire in the external market.
These changes leave education systems facing an uncomfortable reality. While schools and universities continue to signal achievement through credentials, employers are measuring performance directly. Education still certifies. Employers now verify.
This is not a marginal evolution in hiring practice. It is a structural redesign of how opportunity is allocated.
Artificial Intelligence and the Vanishing Training Ladder
Artificial intelligence is not just accelerating work. It is dismantling the invisible apprenticeship that built modern careers.
For decades, the transition from education to professional capability followed a simple pattern. Schools and universities provided theory, while entry-level roles provided training. Graduates learned by doing analysing data, preparing reports, spotting patterns and working alongside experienced colleagues. Through repetition and feedback, they developed judgement, instinct and professional capability.
That system depended on a simple mechanism. The first job was the training ground and that ground is now disappearing.
A 2025 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that technologies already available could automate tasks accounting for roughly 57 percent of U.S. work hours. The impact is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated in the routine, structured work that once formed the foundation of early careers. The work that trained you is the work that is being removed.
As those tasks disappear, entry-level roles contract while expectations rise. Employers are no longer hiring for potential alone. They are hiring for immediate contribution from day one. The model in which people gradually grew into professional capability is being dismantled.
This creates a contradiction at the heart of the modern labour market. Employers want experience, yet the roles that once created it are steadily disappearing.
Without new pathways into work, the consequences are not abstract. Fewer entry points, weaker pipelines and an economy that struggles to convert potential into productivity.
The future of work will not be a contest between humans and machines but a partnership: human judgement, creativity and ethical reasoning combined with the analytical power of intelligent systems. But that future will not emerge on its own. If we remove the training ground and replace it with nothing, we are not building an AI-enabled workforce. We are creating a generation expected to perform without ever being taught how.
Rebuilding the Education-to-Work Pipeline
Britain does not lack diagnoses of the problem. It lacks the resolve to redesign the system around how the modern economy actually works. For decades, policy has treated education as if the labour market remained broadly unchanged. It has not. Artificial intelligence, automation and skills-based hiring are reshaping how capability is identified
and rewarded, yet the structure of education still reflects an older industrial model built around standardised examinations and academic hierarchy.
The first step is to abandon the quiet assumption that university must remain the default pathway for most young people. That model made sense when a degree signalled scarce expertise. When half a generation is pushed through the same academic funnel, the signal weakens, the cost rises and the labour market struggles to absorb the output. A modern system should offer multiple prestigious routes into adulthood, not a single narrow staircase disguised as opportunity.
Technical education and apprenticeships must move from the margins to the centre of the system. In particular, Levels 2 to 4 should become the engine room of early career opportunity, allowing young people to build practical capability while earning and progressing. These routes provide genuine social mobility because they open doors without loading young people with heavy debt before their careers have even begun.
Yet Britain has moved in precisely the opposite direction. Entry-level apprenticeships have shrunk dramatically over the past decade and now represent only 18.6 percent of the 353,500 apprenticeship starts recorded in 2024/25, down from roughly 43 percent a decade earlier. At the same time, higher-level programmes have expanded rapidly, with Level 4 and above now accounting for roughly 40 percent of starts. The system has grown upwards while quietly hollowing out the entry points that once allowed young people to begin their careers.
Reform should reverse that trend decisively. Britain should commit to creating 100,000 additional Level 2 to Level 4 apprenticeship places over the next three years, shifting roughly 33,000 additional entry-level technical starts per year. This would represent a deliberate correction to a decade-long policy drift that has steadily reduced early career opportunities.
The cost is entirely manageable. Average government funding for lower-level apprenticeships currently ranges between £8,000 and £12,000 per place, depending on the training band. Phased over three years, the net additional investment would fall between £800 million and £1.2 billion in total. This sits comfortably within the existing £3.075 billion apprenticeship budget for 2025–26, alongside the government’s £725 million multi-year skills package.
Funds freed by the January 2026 restriction on Level 7 apprenticeships for learners aged 22 and above, already shifting spending away from older professional qualifications towards younger technical routes, would further reduce the incremental cost. The annual increase required would likely fall below £400 million per year.
Importantly, the policy environment is already moving in this direction. Three reforms now in motion make rapid expansion feasible. From August 2026, small and medium-sized employers will receive 100 percent government funding for apprentices aged 16 to 24, removing the 5 percent co-investment that has historically deterred smaller firms. Foundation Apprenticeships introduced from 2025, alongside the ability to deliver shorter eight-month programmes from August 2025, lower entry barriers for both employers and learners. Every secondary school should be connected to regional employer networks, building on careers guidance and T-level placement pilots that have already increased local apprenticeship participation where trialled.
These measures do not require building a new system from scratch. They scale mechanisms that already exist. The system must also become more honest about what success looks like. Today, performance is largely measured through participation and attainment. A modern system should track what actually matters: sustained employment, earnings progression and long-term capability development. Without transparent outcome metrics, reform risks improving inputs while leaving real-world outcomes unchanged.
International experience shows why this works. Countries that have built strong technical pathways consistently deliver lower youth unemployment and stronger school-to-work transitions. Germany’s dual training system supports more than 1.3 million apprentices annually, with employers covering roughly two-thirds of training costs. Youth unemployment remains below 7 percent and the country maintains one of the lowest NEET rates in the OECD. Switzerland goes further, with more than 70 percent of teenagers entering paid apprenticeships that combine classroom learning with real employment, producing both low youth unemployment and strong productivity. The Netherlands, currently the OECD leader on youth engagement, combines vocational education with deep employer-school partnerships and maintains NEET rates below five percent. Across all three countries the pattern is consistent: technical routes carry real prestige, employers are embedded early and assessment focuses on applied capability rather than exam performance alone.
Assessment reform must therefore accompany apprenticeship expansion. The modern labour market does not evaluate people through silent two-hour written examinations, yet that remains the dominant method in Britain. Schools and colleges should increasingly assess students through applied work: project portfolios, collaborative challenges, data analysis and real-world simulations that mirror how employers evaluate talent.
GCSEs and A-levels should not be abolished but their role must be redefined. They were designed to measure academic knowledge under controlled conditions and they continue to do that reasonably well. The problem is not their existence but their dominance. Too much weight is placed on what they capture and too little on what they miss. In a modern economy, no single set of exams can credibly signal overall capability. They should sit alongside, not above, applied assessments that test how knowledge is used in practice.
One practical reform would be the introduction of a National Capability Certificate at eighteen. Alongside GCSEs and A-levels, this qualification would assess how students apply knowledge in unfamiliar situations. Students might analyse complex problems, interpret real datasets, collaborate to develop solutions and defend their reasoning under questioning. The concept draws directly on T-level employer-set projects and the assessment simulations already used by large recruiters, meaning it could be piloted quickly using existing Ofqual infrastructure, with an initial rollout across 20 local authorities from 2027.
Education must also reconnect far more directly with the world of work. Too many young people reach university having spent almost their entire lives inside classrooms with little exposure to how organisations actually operate. A structured Year of Work or Public Service at eighteen would provide meaningful experience before students commit to expensive academic pathways. Similar programmes already exist internationally, giving young people time to develop maturity, explore careers and make more informed decisions about further study.
The curriculum itself must evolve. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how knowledge is used in everyday work, meaning memorisation alone is no longer enough. Students must learn to interpret information, challenge assumptions, analyse data and collaborate with intelligent systems. AI literacy, digital capability and applied problem-solving should become core components of modern education, building on digital skills pilots already operating in more than 150 schools across England. That shift should be underpinned by a National Digital and AI Literacy Standard spanning primary education through to post-16, supported by sustained investment in teacher capability. A modern curriculum cannot be delivered by a workforce trained for a different era.
Over time, Britain should also introduce a National Digital Skills Passport. This portable record would track qualifications, apprenticeships and micro-credentials throughout an individual’s career, allowing people to update and demonstrate their capabilities as industries evolve. In an economy shaped by rapid technological change, education cannot end in early adulthood. Learning must become continuous rather than episodic.
None of these reforms require a blank cheque or revolutionary upheaval. What they require is consistency. Britain needs a cross-party, ten-year framework for education and skills, anchored to its growth and industrial strategy, that outlasts political cycles and provides long-term clarity for employers, educators and young people alike.
The principle is simple. Education should not merely certify learning. It should build capability. Certificates do not grow an economy. Capability does.
The Risk Britain Cannot Ignore
Britain is not failing its young people by accident. It is doing it by design. We have built a system that rewards exam performance, sells aspiration through degrees and then quietly withdraws opportunity at the point it matters most. The result is predictable. More credentials, less mobility and growing frustration among those who did exactly what they were told.
A generation that played by the rules is beginning to realise those rules no longer deliver what they promised. This is not a skills gap. It is a credibility gap. And credibility, once lost, is far harder to rebuild than any curriculum or qualification framework.
If this continues, the consequences will not stop at the labour market. More young people will look abroad for opportunity, while those who remain will face a system that feels increasingly closed. That is how trust erodes, not through a single shock but through the steady sense that the rules no longer work.
This is how decline begins. Not with a crisis but with a quiet withdrawal of belief, followed by a slow exit of those who can leave and a hardening frustration among those who cannot.
A system that no longer converts effort into opportunity does not just fail economically. It fails morally.
The question now is whether policymakers are willing to respond. For those shaping education policy, this is not simply a challenge. It is an opportunity to rebuild a system that young people can trust again.
Matthew Jeffery is one of Britain’s most experienced global talent and recruitment leaders, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
This is part 2 of Matthew’s short series on AI and the AI generation. You can read part 1 here.
After more than 25 years leading global talent acquisition, including overseeing 18,000+ hires at EY and now advising on AI-enabled, skills-based hiring, I have watched employers quietly lose confidence in academic signals and rebuild assessment from the ground up. The rules of hiring have changed. The shift to skills-based hiring is no longer experimental. It is becoming standard.
At its core, skills-based hiring replaces proxies with proof. Instead of assuming capability from degrees, job titles or years of experience, employers are testing what candidates can actually do. That means assessing how people approach problems, how they communicate, how they make decisions and how they perform in realistic scenarios that mirror the role itself.
In recent hiring processes, I have seen candidates with outstanding academic records struggle to demonstrate basic workplace capability, while others with less formal education outperform them immediately in applied tasks. The gap is no longer theoretical. It is visible in real hiring decisions.
Major employers are steadily removing degree requirements as they prioritise demonstrable capability over academic pedigree. LinkedIn data shows job advertisements without degree requirements rising sharply, while research from the Burning Glass Institute confirms the same trend across multiple sectors.
Large organisations have moved beyond credentials altogether, using their scale to redesign hiring around direct evidence of performance. Assessment is no longer about what candidates claim but what they can demonstrate through simulations, work samples and scenario-based tasks that reveal how they think and operate in practice.
The same shift is happening inside organisations. Internal talent marketplaces are increasingly matching employees to projects and roles based on verified skills rather than job titles or formal qualifications. Work is being broken into tasks and capability is being matched to need in real time. Alongside this, employers are building internal academies and reskilling programmes to create capabilities they cannot reliably hire in the external market.
These changes leave education systems facing an uncomfortable reality. While schools and universities continue to signal achievement through credentials, employers are measuring performance directly. Education still certifies. Employers now verify.
This is not a marginal evolution in hiring practice. It is a structural redesign of how opportunity is allocated.
Artificial Intelligence and the Vanishing Training Ladder
Artificial intelligence is not just accelerating work. It is dismantling the invisible apprenticeship that built modern careers.
For decades, the transition from education to professional capability followed a simple pattern. Schools and universities provided theory, while entry-level roles provided training. Graduates learned by doing analysing data, preparing reports, spotting patterns and working alongside experienced colleagues. Through repetition and feedback, they developed judgement, instinct and professional capability.
That system depended on a simple mechanism. The first job was the training ground and that ground is now disappearing.
A 2025 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that technologies already available could automate tasks accounting for roughly 57 percent of U.S. work hours. The impact is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated in the routine, structured work that once formed the foundation of early careers. The work that trained you is the work that is being removed.
As those tasks disappear, entry-level roles contract while expectations rise. Employers are no longer hiring for potential alone. They are hiring for immediate contribution from day one. The model in which people gradually grew into professional capability is being dismantled.
This creates a contradiction at the heart of the modern labour market. Employers want experience, yet the roles that once created it are steadily disappearing.
Without new pathways into work, the consequences are not abstract. Fewer entry points, weaker pipelines and an economy that struggles to convert potential into productivity.
The future of work will not be a contest between humans and machines but a partnership: human judgement, creativity and ethical reasoning combined with the analytical power of intelligent systems. But that future will not emerge on its own. If we remove the training ground and replace it with nothing, we are not building an AI-enabled workforce. We are creating a generation expected to perform without ever being taught how.
Rebuilding the Education-to-Work Pipeline
Britain does not lack diagnoses of the problem. It lacks the resolve to redesign the system around how the modern economy actually works. For decades, policy has treated education as if the labour market remained broadly unchanged. It has not. Artificial intelligence, automation and skills-based hiring are reshaping how capability is identified
and rewarded, yet the structure of education still reflects an older industrial model built around standardised examinations and academic hierarchy.
The first step is to abandon the quiet assumption that university must remain the default pathway for most young people. That model made sense when a degree signalled scarce expertise. When half a generation is pushed through the same academic funnel, the signal weakens, the cost rises and the labour market struggles to absorb the output. A modern system should offer multiple prestigious routes into adulthood, not a single narrow staircase disguised as opportunity.
Technical education and apprenticeships must move from the margins to the centre of the system. In particular, Levels 2 to 4 should become the engine room of early career opportunity, allowing young people to build practical capability while earning and progressing. These routes provide genuine social mobility because they open doors without loading young people with heavy debt before their careers have even begun.
Yet Britain has moved in precisely the opposite direction. Entry-level apprenticeships have shrunk dramatically over the past decade and now represent only 18.6 percent of the 353,500 apprenticeship starts recorded in 2024/25, down from roughly 43 percent a decade earlier. At the same time, higher-level programmes have expanded rapidly, with Level 4 and above now accounting for roughly 40 percent of starts. The system has grown upwards while quietly hollowing out the entry points that once allowed young people to begin their careers.
Reform should reverse that trend decisively. Britain should commit to creating 100,000 additional Level 2 to Level 4 apprenticeship places over the next three years, shifting roughly 33,000 additional entry-level technical starts per year. This would represent a deliberate correction to a decade-long policy drift that has steadily reduced early career opportunities.
The cost is entirely manageable. Average government funding for lower-level apprenticeships currently ranges between £8,000 and £12,000 per place, depending on the training band. Phased over three years, the net additional investment would fall between £800 million and £1.2 billion in total. This sits comfortably within the existing £3.075 billion apprenticeship budget for 2025–26, alongside the government’s £725 million multi-year skills package.
Funds freed by the January 2026 restriction on Level 7 apprenticeships for learners aged 22 and above, already shifting spending away from older professional qualifications towards younger technical routes, would further reduce the incremental cost. The annual increase required would likely fall below £400 million per year.
Importantly, the policy environment is already moving in this direction. Three reforms now in motion make rapid expansion feasible. From August 2026, small and medium-sized employers will receive 100 percent government funding for apprentices aged 16 to 24, removing the 5 percent co-investment that has historically deterred smaller firms. Foundation Apprenticeships introduced from 2025, alongside the ability to deliver shorter eight-month programmes from August 2025, lower entry barriers for both employers and learners. Every secondary school should be connected to regional employer networks, building on careers guidance and T-level placement pilots that have already increased local apprenticeship participation where trialled.
These measures do not require building a new system from scratch. They scale mechanisms that already exist. The system must also become more honest about what success looks like. Today, performance is largely measured through participation and attainment. A modern system should track what actually matters: sustained employment, earnings progression and long-term capability development. Without transparent outcome metrics, reform risks improving inputs while leaving real-world outcomes unchanged.
International experience shows why this works. Countries that have built strong technical pathways consistently deliver lower youth unemployment and stronger school-to-work transitions. Germany’s dual training system supports more than 1.3 million apprentices annually, with employers covering roughly two-thirds of training costs. Youth unemployment remains below 7 percent and the country maintains one of the lowest NEET rates in the OECD. Switzerland goes further, with more than 70 percent of teenagers entering paid apprenticeships that combine classroom learning with real employment, producing both low youth unemployment and strong productivity. The Netherlands, currently the OECD leader on youth engagement, combines vocational education with deep employer-school partnerships and maintains NEET rates below five percent. Across all three countries the pattern is consistent: technical routes carry real prestige, employers are embedded early and assessment focuses on applied capability rather than exam performance alone.
Assessment reform must therefore accompany apprenticeship expansion. The modern labour market does not evaluate people through silent two-hour written examinations, yet that remains the dominant method in Britain. Schools and colleges should increasingly assess students through applied work: project portfolios, collaborative challenges, data analysis and real-world simulations that mirror how employers evaluate talent.
GCSEs and A-levels should not be abolished but their role must be redefined. They were designed to measure academic knowledge under controlled conditions and they continue to do that reasonably well. The problem is not their existence but their dominance. Too much weight is placed on what they capture and too little on what they miss. In a modern economy, no single set of exams can credibly signal overall capability. They should sit alongside, not above, applied assessments that test how knowledge is used in practice.
One practical reform would be the introduction of a National Capability Certificate at eighteen. Alongside GCSEs and A-levels, this qualification would assess how students apply knowledge in unfamiliar situations. Students might analyse complex problems, interpret real datasets, collaborate to develop solutions and defend their reasoning under questioning. The concept draws directly on T-level employer-set projects and the assessment simulations already used by large recruiters, meaning it could be piloted quickly using existing Ofqual infrastructure, with an initial rollout across 20 local authorities from 2027.
Education must also reconnect far more directly with the world of work. Too many young people reach university having spent almost their entire lives inside classrooms with little exposure to how organisations actually operate. A structured Year of Work or Public Service at eighteen would provide meaningful experience before students commit to expensive academic pathways. Similar programmes already exist internationally, giving young people time to develop maturity, explore careers and make more informed decisions about further study.
The curriculum itself must evolve. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how knowledge is used in everyday work, meaning memorisation alone is no longer enough. Students must learn to interpret information, challenge assumptions, analyse data and collaborate with intelligent systems. AI literacy, digital capability and applied problem-solving should become core components of modern education, building on digital skills pilots already operating in more than 150 schools across England. That shift should be underpinned by a National Digital and AI Literacy Standard spanning primary education through to post-16, supported by sustained investment in teacher capability. A modern curriculum cannot be delivered by a workforce trained for a different era.
Over time, Britain should also introduce a National Digital Skills Passport. This portable record would track qualifications, apprenticeships and micro-credentials throughout an individual’s career, allowing people to update and demonstrate their capabilities as industries evolve. In an economy shaped by rapid technological change, education cannot end in early adulthood. Learning must become continuous rather than episodic.
None of these reforms require a blank cheque or revolutionary upheaval. What they require is consistency. Britain needs a cross-party, ten-year framework for education and skills, anchored to its growth and industrial strategy, that outlasts political cycles and provides long-term clarity for employers, educators and young people alike.
The principle is simple. Education should not merely certify learning. It should build capability. Certificates do not grow an economy. Capability does.
The Risk Britain Cannot Ignore
Britain is not failing its young people by accident. It is doing it by design. We have built a system that rewards exam performance, sells aspiration through degrees and then quietly withdraws opportunity at the point it matters most. The result is predictable. More credentials, less mobility and growing frustration among those who did exactly what they were told.
A generation that played by the rules is beginning to realise those rules no longer deliver what they promised. This is not a skills gap. It is a credibility gap. And credibility, once lost, is far harder to rebuild than any curriculum or qualification framework.
If this continues, the consequences will not stop at the labour market. More young people will look abroad for opportunity, while those who remain will face a system that feels increasingly closed. That is how trust erodes, not through a single shock but through the steady sense that the rules no longer work.
This is how decline begins. Not with a crisis but with a quiet withdrawal of belief, followed by a slow exit of those who can leave and a hardening frustration among those who cannot.
A system that no longer converts effort into opportunity does not just fail economically. It fails morally.
The question now is whether policymakers are willing to respond. For those shaping education policy, this is not simply a challenge. It is an opportunity to rebuild a system that young people can trust again.