UK government launches AI boot camps for unemployed young people

Young people out of work or at risk of unemployment in the UK are to join “AI boot camps” where they harness the technology to get a foothold in the workplace.

The government’s latest attempt to address the crisis in Neets – young people not in work or education – involves turning to a technology that many view as a potential threat to employment.

A pilot in north-west England will provide up to 70 people aged 16 to 21 with three weeks of AI training, including learning to build AI tools, understanding how businesses use AI and learning to use the technology responsibly. There will also be workplace skills training such as in using office IT systems and timekeeping.

The government wants the majority of attenders at the boot camp to gain an apprenticeship at local businesses that have signed up, including the defence firm BAE Systems and the food company Heinz.

Lisa Nandy, the digital, culture, media and sport secretary, said the scheme would “support young people at a crucial juncture in their lives”. The pilot will be used to refine an England-wide AI skills scheme due to roll out next summer.

The boot camp will use AI tools from US tech firms including Microsoft, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot.

Bouke Klein Teeselink, an academic at King’s College London and an expert on the impact of AI on work, said the boot camp was a “good idea in principle”.

“What we need to do is make juniors more attractive to companies and one way to do that is make them more productive by teaching them how to do AI well,” he said.

However, Teeselink said he was sceptical that a three-week programme would be enough to make teens “AI-ready”, because AI readiness required continuous learning and updating of skills.

Fears of AI’s impact on jobs have focused heavily on school leavers and graduates because AI tools are viewed as capable of performing the “grunt work” that is typically set aside for workforce newcomers, with white-collar industries such as law, finance and marketing among the most vulnerable.

This week Stanford University in the US flagged a decline in the employment of young workers in AI-exposed occupations such as software engineering and customer service.

The UK’s AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, said the programme would give young people “the skills they need to thrive in the AI workplace”, amid signs of growing pressure on youth employment.

The latest data, published in May, showed the number of young people aged 16 to 24 neither working nor learning surpassed 1 million for the first time since 2013, reaching 1.01 million in the three months from January to March.

An interim report by the former Labour minister Alan Milburn, also published in May, warned that the figure could rise to one in six by 2031 and that Britain risked leaving behind a “lost generation” of young people ill-prepared for work.

Last month Andy Burnham committed to cutting the number of Neets but declined to set a target deadline.