Young people from the UK don’t feel that their school or college prepared them for adult working life, a new study has revealed.

The study - undertaken by the OECD and WorldSkills - asked 18- to 24-year-olds how well, in general, they felt their college or school prepared them for adult life. The answers revealed a negative score of -20 per cent for the UK. 

That percentage is worked out by taking the proportion of those who answered “not very well”, or “not well at all” from those who answered “very well or quite well”. 

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The research aims to provide a snapshot of what young people around the world think about work. The OECD surveyed 15,000 18 to 24-year-olds from 19 different countries. 

The research also revealed that:

• 39 per cent feel confident that they will find a job they really want. 
• 32 per cent said that they worried technological change would threaten their prospects of getting the kind of work they’d would like to get. 
• 69 per cent said that they were confident they have what it takes to retrain if their job was automated 
• 47 per cent said they felt confident enough to go to university. 
• 48 per cent said that careers advice was poor or terrible.