Marks & Spencer is throwing open the doors to 1,000 young people with a new management traineeship aimed squarely at a generation struggling to get a foothold in the jobs market, and, pointedly, you will not need a degree to apply.

The retailer’s nationwide programme, christened “Not Just Any Career”, will run 1,000 traineeships for 18 to 24-year-olds over the next 18 months. It is pitched as a graduate-style scheme, but M&S has deliberately stripped out the degree requirement that locks so many young people out of corporate fast-track programmes before they have even started.

Applications open on 27 July. Successful candidates will be given six months of training built around retail management and confidence-building, alongside hands-on experience on the shop floor. From there they progress to further training before being placed into full-time roles, a clear line of sight from trainee to manager inside a year and a half.

“Retail is one of the few careers where you can start young, learn fast, lead teams early and build an incredible future through hard work and ambition,” said Thinus Keeve, retail director at M&S. “This programme is about opening doors for the next generation and giving talented young people the chance to thrive.”

A response to a ‘generational fault line’

The timing is no accident. M&S’s move lands weeks after the interim report of Alan Milburn’s Young People and Work review, which laid bare the scale of the problem. More than a million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are now not in education, employment or training, the so-called NEET cohort, equivalent to one in eight young people. On current trends, that figure is forecast to climb towards one in six by 2030.

Milburn, a former health secretary under Tony Blair, did not mince his words. “Six in ten young people who are NEET today have never had a job,” he said. “Behind every NEET statistic is a young person who simply hasn’t been given a chance and keeps finding the door to opportunity closed.”

The interim review warned the situation now ranks among the worst in Europe and could deteriorate further still without intervention. Milburn was unusually warm about the M&S initiative, holding it up as exactly the sort of corporate leadership his review is calling for. “M&S is trying to change that. I welcome its efforts to provide a new career ladder for 1,000 young people,” he said. “Young people have not given up on work, we must not give up on them.”

From trolley-pusher to chief executive

There is a personal thread running through the M&S announcement. Chief executive Stuart Machin began his own working life at 16, pushing trolleys at a Sainsbury’s in Kent before working his way up the retail ladder, a trajectory he clearly wants the next generation to be able to repeat.

“A Saturday job can change a young person’s life. I know, because it transformed mine,” Machin wrote in a recent blog post. “But when I think about the challenges facing young people today, I worry that many won’t have the same opportunity.”

He added: “That doesn’t need to be the case. We can do so much more to provide the opportunities, experiences and skills to unlock their confidence and get them into good jobs.”

The new traineeship will run in parallel with M&S’s existing graduate programme, which takes on around 70 people a year against a workforce of roughly 73,300. It also complements Marks & Start, the retailer’s long-running partnership with the King’s Trust, which hands work placements and skills to people facing barriers to employment. That scheme is due to launch a new AI-powered digital platform early next year, offering young people resources and mentoring at scale.

For policymakers and business leaders alike, the announcement will sharpen a debate that has been building for months. Employers’ groups have been pressing ministers to do more to bring young people in from the cold, with some calling for skills tax relief to fund training for NEETs and others backing the government’s recent £725m apprenticeships package. M&S’s bet is a simpler one: open the door, drop the degree barrier, and let ambition do the rest.