For decades, young people have been encouraged to equate education with opportunity.
Study hard, get a degree and success will follow. So why are so many struggling to find work at a time when we’re told the labour market is booming?
There were more than 80,000 young people – defined as those aged from 15 to 34 – registered as being unemployed in the second quarter of 2026, according to the latest Labour Force Survey published this week.
Some 31,800, or 21.1 per cent, of those classified as being unemployed were aged between 25 and 34, the prime working age.
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This was down from more than 38,000, or 27 per cent, in the previous quarter, suggesting there might be some statistical noise in the data.
Yet in many cases young people say they are being turned down for roles in sectors such as retail or hospitality, industries that traditionally gave young people their first jobs, not because they are underqualified but because they are overqualified.
Businesses say higher operating costs are forcing them to cut staff or slow the rate of hiring.
Employers also cite artificial intelligence (AI) as a reason for taking on fewer entry-level graduates. AI can do tasks like data processing and basic report writing that were previously the preserve of junior staff.
Competition for graduate-level roles has never been more intense, with some positions attracting thousands of CVs and with applicants being forced through gruelling rounds of interviews.
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Many candidates never get through the initial AI-screening process deployed by some firms, making the experience seem mechanical and alienating.
The pathway from education to employment is not as straightforward as the headline employment metrics suggest.
Alex Diaconu, who has a degree in cybersecurity and digital forensics from TU Dublin, reckons he has sent out 50 to 60 job applications.
“About 70 per cent of the time I get an email saying ‘unfortunately you did not make it to the next stage’, and the rest I never hear back from at all. I’ve only had four or five interviews,” he says.
Diaconu has been applying to internships and graduate programmes since the start of his final year in college but has yet to get an offer. Getting so many rejections “makes you doubt yourself and your future as well”, he says.
The volume of rejections has left him wondering whether to look outside the sector entirely, despite cybersecurity being one of the fastest-growing industries.
The Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC) – which lead the so-called milk-round recruitment programmes – are said to have reduced their annual intake of graduates by at least 20 per cent. Some say the figure is higher.
In the UK, these firms have eliminated 1,100 entry-level roles over the past two years in response to a continuing decline in advisory work and the advent of AI.
Finance, professional services and Big Tech were traditionally the largest recruiters of graduates, says Trayc Keevans, global foreign direct investment director at recruiters Morgan McKinley.
“They had highly structured annual programmes and were very visible. Because some of those employers have reduced their graduate intakes, it has created an impression that the overall graduate market has contracted dramatically, which is not the case,” she says.
But the fall-off in some of these traditional graduate channels is being accompanied by increased opportunities “in areas like engineering, construction, infrastructure, life sciences and sustainability”.
“What we are seeing is more of a redistribution of graduate opportunities. The jobs haven’t simply disappeared, but they are increasingly being created in different sectors and in different types of organisations, so the pathways into graduate employment are less obvious than they traditionally were.”
Keevans acknowledges recruitment has become significantly more challenging for graduates and employers. She cites a recent example where a client firm was looking to fill three entry-level finance posts.
Candidates faced an initial screening interview; followed by an hour-long interview with the hiring manager; followed by a two-hour problem-solving, interpersonal skills segment in an assessment centre with other candidates; followed by a final two-and-a-half hour panel interview with several people from the company’s global team.
AI has played a part in this punishing vetting process, Keevans says. “The type of CVs we’re getting are pitch perfect and you would say, this is amazing, this is exactly the person and then you see the exact same CV coming from the next person.”
“There is a lot more work to decipher what is true and what is not.On paper it looks perfect but employers are no longer trusting it.
“We recently advertised an entry-level position and received close to 250 applications within the first 12 hours. Despite that volume, none of those initial applications met the requirements of the role, reflecting the poor quantity to relevance ratio in today’s job market.”
On the other side of this equation is Cian Fitzgerald, who recently completed a masters in mechanical engineering at UCD. In recent weeks he has applied for 30 jobs on recruitment website Indeed.
“And from those 30 jobs, I only heard back from two of them. One was an automatic rejection and the other I went for an interview last week and I’m still waiting to hear back,” he says.
Fitzgerald believes his CV is being scanned by an AI tool which picks out keywords to see if his credentials match up to the role; a rather crude process and a complaint echoed by many young jobseekers.
“You might get a phone call from someone or you might not,” he says.
Fitzgerald says he applied to Intel via the company’s website and received a rejection email two hours later; the implication being that no one from the company actually appraised his qualifications.
A recent report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) noted that some of the sharpest rises in youth unemployment have been in higher-income economies, a trend it said was “frustrating the aspirations of millions of young people at the start of their working lives”.
The report also estimated 6.1 per cent of jobs held by young people aged 15 to 29 were in occupations highly exposed to AI-related changes.
“Higher unemployment among 25 to 34-year-olds is a concern, particularly as this is a key stage for people building their careers. But it would be too simple to put this down to AI alone,” says Jack Kennedy, senior economist at Indeed.
“Ireland’s labour market has cooled from the highs of the post-pandemic period, and when employers become more cautious about hiring, younger workers can feel the impact first, particularly those trying to take their first steps on the career ladder.
“AI is certainly changing the skills employers are looking for, and Ireland is at the forefront of that shift,” he says, noting that around one in seven Irish job postings mention AI, one of the highest shares internationally.
“But this doesn’t necessarily mean AI is directly replacing jobs. We’re increasingly seeing AI create demand for new skills and roles, and that demand is spreading well beyond traditional tech jobs,” Kennedy says.
Despite the disconnect between employers and young people, Ireland has achieved the fastest reduction in its youth Neet rate (the percentage of young people not in education, employment or training) of any EU country over the past 10 years.
It fell from 14.3 per cent in 2015 to 6.1 per cent last year. That compares with a rate of 12.8 per cent in the UK, equating to more than a million people.
Former UK government minister Alan Milburn, who is heading up a UK government review into the causes of youth unemployment, recently led a delegation to Dublin to learn how Ireland had reduced its rate.
While much of the improvement is linked to the fast-growing economy, increased funding for Deis schools and apprenticeship programmes that help students better prepare for work was highlighted as a factor.
Many believe the perception gap between technical colleges and traditional universities is outdated, particularly given the skills shortages in certain sectors.
The value of internships and work-integrated learning has never been more valued by employers and traditional universities are increasingly making it a core component of degree programmes.
“Youth unemployment and specifically graduate unemployment is a key talking point in lots of economies,” says Kate English, chief economist at Deloitte Ireland.
“For example, in the US, recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 have recorded a rise in unemployment, with the rate for this category at its highest since 2013.
“While AI is one reason put forward, other explanations that have been suggested include the impact working from home is having on the market and cyclical reasons [some sectors slowing down or uncertainty weighing on investment],” she says.
The cost-pressures on firms is something that is frequently highlighted here.
“Successive increases in the national minimum wage has put pressure on graduate/entry level recruitment, as minimum wages converge with graduate earnings,” says Irish Small and Medium Enterprises (Isme) chief executive Neil McDonnell.
“The retail and hospitality sectors are taking steps to reduce labour costs via reduced services – auto-check-in in hotels, no breakfast, auto checkouts in supermarkets – and shorter opening times, no opening Sundays/Mondays.”
McDonnell also notes that legal graduate recruitment is down, with senior lawyers now using AI products rather than graduate entrants.
“Not just Claude and Copilot, there are now specialist AIs in the legal sphere such as Harvey, Irys, CoCounsel, Norm AI and Kimi,” he says.
“Who will train the senior lawyers does not seem to be a question on the agenda at present,” he says, noting that buyers of legal services are asking for fee reductions to reflect AI adoption, “so this is a cost-driven process”.
Having the qualification but not the necessary experience has always been a catch-22 for young people. That said, the lower echelons of the career ladder seem to be shrinking as firms seek to automate routine tasks.
Cost-of-living pressures, including housing costs, also make low-paid positions a financial struggle for many young workers.
At the same time, competition for these jobs has never been as fierce. We may be at full employment but young workers still face significant barriers to entering the workforce.
