Stop telling young people 'learn to code' - it's already too late

We were already too late.

It sounded sensible. Tech was growing. Digital skills were in demand. Coding looked like a passport to security. But in 2026, that advice looks misguided because the entry-level tasks that once helped people build a career in coding are now exactly the kind of tasks AI is starting to absorb.

I recently overheard an 18-year-old say, “I wouldn’t do what my mum and dad did, because that’s not a viable career path anymore. I’ve got to find my own way.” It stopped me in my tracks. Not because it sounded dramatic, but because it sounded so wise from someone so young. Younger people know the old career ladders are wobbling. They know the labour market is shifting beneath their feet. But do they know where to turn?

At the same time, Britain has nearly 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, and youth unemployment has risen to 16.1 per cent, its highest level in a decade. The government is now responding with a £1 billion package, including £3,000 subsidies for employers who hire unemployed young people.

The problem is not that learning to code has no value. It absolutely does. Learning to code still teaches logic, systems thinking and the fundamentals of how technology works. In that sense, it remains useful, just as learning maths still matters even though we all have calculators. We will still need people who know how to code, just not in the numbers or shape that we currently have. The mistake was treating coding as the whole answer, rather than one building block in a much wider skills mix.

What businesses need more of is not just technical execution, but judgement. Critical thinking. Communication. Relationship handling. Storytelling. Quality control. The ability to challenge an answer, spot when something does not make sense and know when to push, pause or ask a better question. Those are the skills that become more valuable as automated output becomes cheap and abundant. The World Economic Forum has similarly identified resilience, flexibility, agility, AI literacy, data analysis, and strategic thinking among the skills that will rise most in value by 2030.

But this is where the debate stops being abstract. If businesses quietly cut entry-level roles because AI can now do parts of them faster, they may improve this quarter’s efficiency while wrecking the next decade’s talent pipeline. You do not get experienced professionals without giving people a way in. You do not get future managers, advisers or leaders if nobody ever gets the chance to learn how work really happens. And that learning is not just technical. It is human. It is watching how a client conversation is handled. It is learning how to recover when something goes wrong. It is developing the judgment to distinguish between a polished vanilla answer and a good one.

Britain is already showing signs of that strain. Competition for early-career roles is now intense, with the Institute of Student Employers reporting 140 applicants per vacancy, while my own view is that employers need to place less weight on narrow credentials and more on learnability, transferable skills and structured development.

So, what should change? Young people should absolutely keep building digital and AI fluency. But they should stop thinking that technical knowledge alone is a career plan. The winning combination now is technical confidence plus human range: curiosity, adaptability, communication, commercial awareness and the confidence to think for yourself.

Schools, colleges and universities need to catch up too. We cannot keep preparing people for a labour market that no longer exists. That means more emphasis on critical thinking, work experience, interdisciplinary learning and real-world exposure to how AI changes jobs, not just how it performs tasks.

Government also has a role beyond announcing subsidies. If nearly a million young people are outside work or education, this is not a niche issue. And it is made harder by the fact that poor health is increasingly part of the picture: the Health Foundation says the share of NEET young people reporting a work-limiting health condition rose from 26 per cent in 2015 to 44 per cent in 2025.

But business cannot sit back and wait for Whitehall to solve it. Employers need to redesign work around skills, not old job architectures built for another era. They need to protect deliberate early-careers pathways, use rotational programmes, hire for potential and create environments where younger workers can build judgment, not just complete tasks. That is not charity. It is succession planning.

The truth is simple. Learning to code was not stupid advice. But on its own, it is no longer enough. The real risk now is raising a generation to work like machines, just as machines get better at doing the work.

If Britain wants a workforce that can thrive in the age of AI, we need to stop asking only what technology can do. We need to ask what only people can do and start building education, hiring and career paths around that answer.

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Martin Colyer is the Director of AI and Innovation at HR consultancy firm LACE Partners.

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