Prosecco pratfalls and coffee catastrophes: Neets are missing out on formative first-job experiences | Isabel Brooks

Everyone remembers their first job. More often than not, it’s in the service industry. I started at 14, pouring drinks, serving food and standing with an ice-cream tray. This is where I learned how to handle mistakes, such as dropping an entire tray of prosecco glasses, or spraying hot coffee all over a bridesmaid because I plunged the cafetiere with too much gusto. I learned how to talk to angry strangers, and what it means to have a bad manager. I learned that the customer is always right, except when you’re talking to chefs, who will throw ham at your head if you tell them that. All in all, I did 10 years of restaurant, bar, pub and cafe work, from the age of 14 to 24, and I largely attribute the formation of my character to that decade of work.

But this kind of character-building experience is under threat. Job postings for temporary work in hospitality in the UK were down by 25% year-on-year between 2024 and 2025, with 22,369 fewer unique postings. Hospitality leaders have blamed rising wage and tax costs for their inability to hire new starters, and young people are bearing the brunt: nearly 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training (Neet), despite 84% of these seeking work. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has explicitly warned that the industry relies heavily on 16- to 24-year-olds, so the impact will be on teenagers seeking their first job. In Manchester, Nell’s Pizza advertised 10 part-time roles for people between the ages of 14 and 18, and received about 2,000 applications.

But it’s not just the career prospects and the financial setbacks that are at stake here – young people will miss out on a more fundamental process of maturing. For many British teenagers, myself included, those summer jobs pulling pints are an apprenticeship in adulthood.

Working in hospitality as a teenager was how I grew up. If I hadn’t managed to get these jobs, I would never have had to apologise to an irate customer for the large snail that was crawling on the rim of their bowl (“our salad is just really fresh, sorry”), nor peel paralytic pensioners off the floor and deposit them into taxis. These may not immediately seem like transferable skills, but learning how to conduct myself in difficult encounters with people, in person, regardless of how random the specific instance, is a skill I am grateful to have – especially when people only a little younger than me are being served social, life and job opportunities that are increasingly remote and online.

I also think I would have less character, whatever “character” is, without this experience. In fact, the word comes from the Greek verb to scratch, cut or engrave, only becoming the term for “a sum of qualities that define a person” in the 1600s. Both still apply; the scratches we get along the way define us, or, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Could Britain’s Neet problem partly be one of young people losing access to the kind of first jobs that used to get them on to the career ladder? Of today’s 24-year-old Neets, 45% have never had a job, which suggests the salient issue is getting a foot in the door. The Neet crisis should be renamed the “teenagers can’t get bar work” crisis, because which 16-year-old or university student is getting a job that isn’t in hospitality?

It’s a mistake not to prioritise this industry, which, given the encroachment of AI, holds Britain’s future job prospects – more so than manufacturing or high-productivity service sectors. We need to stop seeing these jobs as merely stepping stones to better-paying, more prestigious jobs, but instead as a crucial part of the economy and, importantly, our lives. I am struck by how the rhetoric around Neets relies heavily on the word “cost”: the “cost” to that person later in life “will be up to £300,000” in lost earnings. The “cost” to the economy and the taxpayer is £125bn every year – “more than we spend on education”. What a bleak way to talk and think about people.

And what will happen to all these young people who miss out? There is strong evidence that a part-time job while at school leads to higher self-efficacy and greater confidence. So, without this training ground to experiment in adulthood, the scratches formed when young people finally join the workforce may be more painful. This forecasted damage has been given a name: “long-term scarring”.

As a young graduate, I was very lucky to get a job in a busy London restaurant. It was during the summer of 2020, prime pandemic time, and I had applied for 100 other jobs without hearing back. But employers since have never been interested in this part of my CV. How ironic, because that was the hardest job I’ve ever had, and it set the bar for the type of employee, colleague, friend and overall person I am now.