As Scottish Careers Week gets underway, Developing the Young Workforce is calling for Scotland to build on the enormous contribution employers already make to young people, by ensuring that every young person can understand and access the growing range of pathways available to them.
Across Scotland this week, employers will step into classrooms, welcome young people into workplaces, take part in careers events, deliver practical activities and share their experience of industries ranging from construction and engineering to healthcare, finance, technology and the creative industries.
Scottish Careers Week, which runs from 9 to 13 November under the theme Shape the Future, is designed to bring employers, educators, careers professionals, partners and communities together and help people understand their options and make confident choices about their future.
For Developing the Young Workforce (DYW), it is also an opportunity to recognise something which can occasionally be overlooked in the current media debate about young people, skills and employment: employers across Scotland are already doing an enormous amount.
At a time when there continues to be understandable concern about young people who become disconnected from education, employment or training, it is important that we recognise the infrastructure Scotland has already built to connect young people with the world of work, and then ask how we can make it work even better.
A national network with employers at its heart
For more than a decade, DYW has worked to bring employers and education closer together.
Today, 20 employer-led DYW Regional Groups work across Scotland, connecting businesses with schools, colleges and young people. Every publicly funded secondary school also has access to a member of staff with a remit to facilitate DYW activity between employers and young people.
During the 2025/26 academic year alone, DYW Regional Groups worked with more than 6,500 employers, delivered more than 16,000 employer-led activities, and supported more than 450,000 attendances by young people.
Those numbers represent everything from a local business giving an hour to speak to a class, through to workplace visits, practical industry challenges, work experience, mentoring and sustained partnerships between employers and schools. And increasingly, these conversations are beginning earlier.
Although DYW’s principal focus remains secondary education, employer engagement is also taking place in primary schools. In 2025/26, DYW facilitated 142 employer-led activities for primary pupils, involving 216 employers and reaching more than 10,000 young people. That matters. Career education should not be about asking a seven-year-old what job they want when they grow up. It should be about widening horizons. It is an opportunity to show children where the subjects and skills they are developing might take them, introduce them to people and workplaces they may never otherwise encounter, and gradually build their understanding of the world beyond the classroom.
Employers make a difference
There is good evidence for making those connections.
Research shows that young people who explore and experience the world of work while still at school subsequently experience lower unemployment, higher wages and greater career satisfaction. The strongest employer engagement is authentic, repeated and connected to a young person’s wider learning, rather than being treated simply as a one-off event.
The opportunity is therefore not simply to ask employers to do more. It is to make sure the significant time, knowledge and opportunity that employers are already investing has the greatest possible impact.
We need to talk differently about pathways
Scottish Careers Week is also an opportunity to think about the choices we present to young people. Every summer, considerable public attention understandably focuses on National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers. These qualifications remain hugely important, but they are no longer the whole story.
In 2026, more than 120,000 vocational and technical qualifications were awarded in Scotland across Awards, National Progression Awards, National Certificates and Skills for Work courses, an increase of 9.1% on 2025. That growth matters because young people are different; they have different strengths, ambitions, interests and ways of learning.
A successful education system should therefore be able to celebrate a young person achieving a Higher alongside another gaining an industry-relevant qualification, developing practical skills or beginning their journey into an apprenticeship. These should not be presented as second-best alternatives to a supposedly conventional route. They are different routes towards successful futures.
Apprenticeships should carry equal status
Scotland already has strong foundations on which to build.
Foundation Apprenticeships allow school pupils to combine their classroom learning with structured experience of the workplace. Modern Apprenticeships allow people to earn a wage while securing an industry-recognised qualification, with more than 80 different frameworks spanning sectors including construction, healthcare, financial services and IT.
Around 12,000 employers in Scotland currently invest in more than 40,000 Foundation, Modern and Graduate Apprentices, demonstrating the scale of work-based learning already taking place. The question is whether we collectively talk about these pathways with the same confidence and aspiration with which we talk about more traditional academic routes.
University will absolutely be the right destination for many young people. For others it will be college, an apprenticeship, training or moving directly into employment.
The task for all of us is not to steer young people towards one particular answer; it is to make sure they understand the full range of answers available.
Opportunity should not depend on who you know
There is another reason why employer engagement matters.
For some young people, meeting an employer through school may simply reinforce knowledge and connections already available to them through family, friends and wider networks. For others, it can open a door which did not previously exist.
A young person should not need a parent who works in construction to find out what a quantity surveyor does. They should not need a family connection in finance, technology or engineering to understand how to enter those industries. Furthermore, access to meaningful work experience should not depend on whether someone at home happens to know the right person.
Scotland’s latest participation figures illustrate why equity must remain at the heart of this work. The 2026 Annual Participation Measure, published by Skills Development Scotland last week, showed that 93.6% of 16–19-year-olds were participating in education, training or employment. But participation stood at 89.1% among those from the 20% most deprived areas, compared with 97.5% in the 20% least deprived areas.
Employer engagement cannot remove every barrier a young person faces. But done well, it can give more young people access to insight, experience and professional networks which otherwise may not be available to them. That is why equity of access matters just as much as the overall volume of activity.
Making every connection count
Scottish Careers Week gives us good reason to celebrate.
Across Scotland, thousands of employers are already helping young people understand careers, develop skills, experience workplaces and consider possibilities they may never previously have encountered.
Scotland has also built something significant around that contribution: a national network connecting employers with education, careers professionals in schools, established apprenticeship pathways, growing numbers of vocational qualifications, and organisations across the public, private and third sectors committed to improving outcomes for young people. We should be proud of that. But pride should not mean complacency.
The next stage is about making those connections more equitable, making all pathways genuinely visible and valued, and making it as straightforward as possible for employers to contribute their time and expertise. Because ultimately, helping a young person shape their future is not the job of an employer, a school, a careers adviser, DYW or any individual organisation alone. It is what becomes possible when we all work together.
