A Bold Statement: Promising work experience to every student

A national pledge to give every undergraduate work experience is easy to applaud, but much harder to deliver.

Universities UK has just announced a bold statement; every undergraduate in England will receive meaningful work-based learning by 2035.

Higher education is under pressure to deliver work-ready graduates to the labour market. However, setting a target that assumes employers have the capacity, the demand and the funding to support this, creates a huge gap between the ambition and the reality.

Bold statements are easy to publish. Delivering them is a different exercise entirely.

The targets exceed the plan behind it

Universities UK's Future Jobs Roadmap, unveiled at its annual conference and developed with Pearson and the British Chambers of Commerce, sets out that all undergraduates should have access to meaningful work-based learning by 2035, with a milestone of 50% by 2030. Hit that target and you're looking at around 1.4 million undergraduates undertaking work experience every year.

That's not a simple tweak to the existing provision. It's a step-change at scale, which the roadmap's own evidence base doesn't fully support. A Universities UK survey of 500 employers found only 35% felt graduates arrived with all the skills reasonably expected of them, and while 79% were in favour of work experience in principle, 'in favour' and 'committed to hosting placements at a national scale' are two very different things. A plan built on employer goodwill needs employer capacity to match it, and right now the roadmap has more of the former than the latter.

There is clearly a need for better early talent work-readiness, however this should be defined in collaboration with employers, so any 'work' opportunities deliver on expectations. For example, virtual work experience simulations may meet the target criteria but not deliver the value that's required for work-readiness.

Reliance on government spend underpins the strategy

The most attention-grabbing recommendation in the roadmap isn't really about change within university curricula at all. It's a request to government to extend the existing employer National Insurance exemption for under-21s to everyone under 25, based on 65% of employers saying cost relief would let them recruit more entry-level talent. Wonkhe's analysis puts the price tag at somewhere in the region of £7 billion. The assumption underpinning the strategy is that government will back the target through policy change.

If that funding doesn't materialise, the plan becomes unachievable without even considering the logistical challenge. Its a central lever for making placements affordable for the employers, who'd need to provide 1.4 million meaningful work opportunities.

Growing the pie risks shrinking someone else's slice

There's a quieter risk buried in the ambition; if employers can access free or subsidised placement labour, what happens to the ordinary paid part-time work students currently rely on? Retail and hospitality are where a huge number of students already build the timekeeping, communication and resilience skills employers say they want. Wonkhe's critique of the roadmap makes exactly this point, that the plan would be stronger if it credited the work students are already doing rather than only counting new, university-brokered placements toward the target.

Build a national placement machine without accounting for the informal economy of student work already happening, and you risk displacing paid jobs with potentially unpaid experience, widening the gap for students who need the wage more than something to add to their CV. There may also be a further impact on apprenticeships which enable young people to gain a degree whilst in employment. If undergraduates are receiving subsidised work experience, will employers still maintain the same level of apprenticeships?

SMEs need support to not become a bottleneck

Three-quarters of graduates say they'd like to work for a smaller employer. The roadmap correctly identifies SMEs as central to any realistic scaling plan, proposing regionally managed graduate schemes to connect the two. But SMEs are exactly the employers that are least equipped to build structured placement programmes from a standing start. A large graduate employer can flex an existing scheme. A ten-person business with no HR function is being asked to build one from nothing, at the same time as absorbing whatever cost the NIC change does or doesn't offset.

Scaling through the employers with the least spare capacity is a harder problem than the roadmap's confident targets suggest.

Virtual work experience fills the gap, but not the need

Faced with a shortfall in real placements, the obvious pressure release valve is virtual work experience: online modules, remote internships, structured programmes delivered at low cost and effectively infinite scale. The roadmap's own definition of 'work-based learning' includes exactly this alongside sandwich years and job shadowing.

The evidence on whether it delivers the same value is not encouraging. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study of almost 10,000 interns, split roughly evenly between virtual and in-person, found the virtual group reported lower satisfaction, less career development value and fewer networking opportunities than their in-person peers.

A separate Glassdoor survey found 70% of interns hold a negative association with remote work generally. Employers keep asking for workplace exposure and professional confidence. Virtual placements are cheap and scalable precisely because they offer less of both.

None of this makes virtual work experience worthless. It's genuinely useful for students who can't relocate, access opportunities or afford unpaid time in a big city. But this approach creates a risk. The ambitious target may be met through easier-to-deliver opportunities , but it doesn't actually close the gap employers describe.

The roadmap barely mentions the supply line it already has

There's a source of work experience the roadmap treats as an afterthought, and it doesn't depend on a single external employer saying yes; enterprise education. Setting up a small venture, running a student society as a live operating budget, pitching a real product to real customers. None of it needs an employer's spare capacity, an SME's non-existent HR function, or £7 billion of NIC relief to exist. It can be built straight into the curriculum.

The evidence that this actually moves the needle on employability is more developed than the roadmap's framing suggests. A UK-wide review of entrepreneurship education programmes found their graduates have higher employability rates than their business degree counterparts, even if that comes with lower initial earnings as they take entrepreneurial rather than conventional career paths.

Separate qualitative research with 45 UK higher education professionals found entrepreneurship education develops the same adaptability, resilience and comfort-with-uncertainty employers keep citing as missing, and prepares graduates for the non-linear, portfolio-style careers that are increasingly the norm rather than the exception.

That's a second supply line the roadmap could lean on far more heavily, and one that scales with the university's own curriculum rather than someone else's headcount.

So what should actually change

The instinct behind the roadmap is right. Students need more real contact with the world of work, earlier and more often. But building 1.4 million new placements from scratch, funded by a subsidy that isn't confirmed, hosted disproportionately by employers with the least capacity to provide them, treats work experience as a supply problem. Build more slots, fill more slots.

It's arguably not a supply problem at all. It's a recognition problem. Most students are already accumulating exactly the skills employers say they lack, just not in contexts that get labelled 'work experience'. The bar job, the society committee, the freelance project, the unofficial mentor a student found through a placement, a lecturer, a family friend. None of it shows up in a national placement count, and all of it is contributing to real developmental work.

A target built around headcount pushes universities to manufacture more formal placements. A target built around skills and connection would ask a different question; what has this student actually learned to do, and how have they actively built relationships with established professionals? That's a cheaper, faster, more equitable lever than waiting on £7 billion of NIC relief and hoping SMEs find the capacity to match it. It's also the direction the wider careers conversation is already moving towards; skills-based recognition and human networks that enable early talent to successfully kickstart their professional career.

That's also why enterprise education deserves a far bigger role in this plan than a footnote. It's a supply line that already exists within higher education settings and it would allow them to define, assess and instil the employability skills required by employers as part of the curriculum. Embedded alongside employer placements, not instead of them, it gives the roadmap a second route to the same destination.

The pledge is bold. Delivering it will take more than a target.

Universities UK is right that graduates need more than a degree to get a foot in the door. But a 2035 deadline doesn't create employer capacity, and a subsidy that hasn't been agreed doesn't create placements. If the sector wants this to be more than a headline, it has to look past the formal placement as the only unit that counts, and start valuing the skills, relationships and experience students are already building everywhere else.

The target isn't wrong. It's just not, on its own, an achievable plan that will deliver the intended outcome.