Interesting article on things not to say to a young unemployed person:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/telling-young-person-get-job-education-employment
In particular, I thought this part has been true for huge numbers of people I know:
//Today's youth has spent years chasing qualifications no one ever asks us about. The notion that algebra would ever be useful seemed fishy, but the grownups insisted: education, no matter how apparently arbitrary, leads to jobs.
But the minute we graduated, something switched in employers' heads. The same generation who had us sit Sats and the 11-plus and the 12-plus and Sats again and mock GCSEs and real GCSEs and AS-levels and A-levels and BAs and MAs and MScs and PhDs decided education is an afterthought. Experience is what's really important. Which none of us had, because we'd been busy pretending Romeo and Juliet weren't just horny teenagers and Pythagoras wasn't the most tedious bastard that ever existed.
We were told that education was a ticket to employment, when really it's more like vague directions to the station.//
Have young people been let down by the previous generation?