‘You think it’s your fault, you think: why can’t I keep a job, what did I do wrong?’

ON the face of it, if you’re looking for work then the last place you want to be living in is Hull.

According to a recent study, carried out by job search website Adzuna, there are almost 80 unemployed people chasing every job vacancy in the city – making it the toughest place in the country to try and find work. Last year, David Cameron launched a nationwide work programme, to give the long term unemployed the support they need to match them to local vacancies. But with unemployment at a 17-year high, the competition for jobs is fierce and young people, in particular, are struggling to find worthwhile opportunities.

Rachel Hickingbotham is bright, articulate and unemployed. She left school with five good GCSEs and spent two years at college in Hull studying AS-level psychology and English Literature before trying to find a job. “I’ve worked in a factory and a bakery, I ran a newsagents’ for a while and I worked in a takeaway, but nothing I would want to do with the rest of my life. I really want to get into youth work but it’s difficult to get into without the right qualifications,” she says.

The 22-year-old points out that while there are plenty of temporary jobs available, finding anything with genuine prospects that lasts for more than just a couple of months is difficult.

“If you’re only working for a month or two it gets depressing because you think it’s your fault, you think ‘why can’t I keep a job, what am I doing wrong?’ But it’s not just about that. It’s about the recession and it’s about the businesses that can’t afford to keep people on.

“A lot of my friends are either unemployed or they’re employed in the retail industry. They don’t want to work in supermarkets or shops but they need the money and they can’t afford to quit their job and go looking for something they want to do, or go and re-train.”

Rachel is among the latest group of young people involved with CatZero, a Hull-based youth education and training project.

Over the last three years, 416 people from Hull aged between 16 and 18 who were not in employment, education or training (so-called NEETs) have taken part in its youth development programme and of those, 285 – almost seven out of 10 – have gained the confidence and skills to re-enter education, join training courses, or get a job.

The charity has extended the scheme, funded by the One Hull partnership, to work with 18 to 24-year-olds and Rachel says it has made a huge difference to everyone on the 12-week course. “At the start, nobody was really motivated, everyone was sick of the job centre and sick of putting CVs out and not getting a reply, but now everyone’s more confident.

“A lot of people leave college and feel they don’t have the skills or experience but at CatZero they point out that you have personal skills that you can take into a job that maybe other people wouldn’t have,” she says.

“There’s a misconception that young people don’t want jobs, but that’s not the case. All the people on this course want a job and want to improve themselves and at CatZero they make the effort of getting to know us and finding out what we want to do for a living, rather than pushing us to get a job just to fill a gap.”

The charity’s chairman Jim Dick is delighted by the impact the project has had. “It’s tough out there at the moment and the danger is you do lose confidence which makes it harder to get a job. What we do is motivate people, build up there self-esteem and give them skills training. You can’t give everyone a job, but what you can do is encourage them to get the right skills that will get them a job at some stage in the future.”

Amy Adams, 18, is one of its success stories. She was jobless when she came to the charity two years ago. As part of the programme she took a first aid course and so impressed the tutor that he employed her as a part-time assistant. She then landed a job working for a private ambulance service and now plans to go to university.

“It’s hard to get a job these days because people want experience. But here they give you the confidence and the qualifications to move on to something you really want to do.”

But if Amy gives hope to other young people, down the road at the nearby job centre such optimism is hard to find. Daniel Rainey, 24, is looking for work and says the situation is “terrible”. “I went on one internet job site and it had zero jobs for the whole of Hull. You would think they’d be able to scrape one job together, wouldn’t you? And where there are jobs they want you to have previous experience, your own transport and qualifications.”

Daniel hasn’t worked since losing his job as a door-to-door salesman in 2008. “That was just before everything went downhill and after that there wasn’t much demand for it.” He says that only two of his friends are in full-time jobs right now and isn’t optimistic about his own job prospects. “Any job I do go for I don’t expect a reply because there are that many people looking for jobs – it’s just a waiting game.”

The unemployment figures make grim reading up and down the country but Hull isn’t helped by the fact that its city boundaries have always been drawn very tightly round the inner-city, which doesn’t include the leafy suburbs meaning statistics can appear skewed.

This has been compounded by the fact that many of the city’s secondary schools have historically been among the worst performing in the country, meaning young people leave with lower grades and enter a job market with fewer opportunities.

“Hull has been struggling since the back end of 2007 when the caravan industry, which was important here, went into decline,” says Jenny Smithey, recruitment manager at Hull-based Kingston Recruitment. “Since then there’s been the impact of the public sector cuts and problems in the retail market.”

As a result they have been inundated with job applications as people become increasingly desperate to find work. “We are seeing an overwhelming response to every job advert we do and an online ad can easily get hundreds of responses. But very few actually tick the box of what the job is looking for. A lot of people looking for work are on benefits and they apply for jobs for which they have no skills whatsoever because they need to showing a willingness to look for work.”

Young people aged between 16 and 24 have been particularly badly affected.

“They often don’t have a lot of skills because nobody has invested in them during the recession and they don’t have a CV that shows much work experience, so they start applying for anything and everything in the hope that somebody will give them an opportunity,” she says.

“Two or three years ago, when the recession was at its peak, companies battened down the hatches and became leaner which was when fine when things were quiet because they could spread the work around.”

Last year saw the job market pick up and some companies have found themselves without the time and resources to train new recruits, which is why they want people who can hit the ground running.

However, Smithey says that, despite the vast number of applicants, it’s often taking longer to fill some posts. “At the height of the recession, it would take about three, or four weeks to get a position filled. Now, it’s three or four months, because companies are prepared to wait for the right candidate.”

But there is hope for the future. Hull’s economic fortunes are expected to be transformed in the next few years thanks to £1bn of planned investment in the renewable energy sector on the Humber estuary. This includes investment in offshore wind farms and tidal power generation, as the UK pushes towards its 30 per cent target for renewable energy by 2020.

It is believed this could do for Hull what the oil industry did for Aberdeen and help create thousands of jobs. “There is a lot of gloom and doom around but the growth in the renewable sector is the best news the region could have hoped for,” says Smithey.

She says schools, along with the university, are already looking at ways they can tap into this emerging job market.

“Some good has come out of the recession because people have started working together locally and if we can make engineering a desirable career for children that would be a big step forward, because rather than kids leaving school thinking, ‘what hope have I got?’ We could be bringing them up with real aspirations.”