According to the BBC the NHS in England is hiring 10,000 school leavers given training by the Prince's Trust charity. The new staff will go some way towards solving the shortage caused by rising demands on the service and falling EU migration.
Research by the charity suggests there is concern among public-sector employers that jobs are becoming harder to fill.
The new staff will work in non-clinical jobs although some may train as nurses or doctors eventually.
Speaking to the BBC NHS Employers chief executive Danny Mortimer sia: "There are lots of young people who struggle to access the kinds of careers and opportunities that we offer and the opportunity of this partnership is to reach out to those young people.|
In Birmingham, where the NHS is the city's biggest employer, training of the new staff is well under way, with some already in post.
A YouGov poll of 1,000 managers across all sectors, conducted in September 2019 for the Prince's Trust but not yet been published, found 63% of those in the public sector believed there was currently a skills shortage in their area.
Dame Martina Milburn, the Prince's Trust chief executive said: "Some employers use recruitment processes that make it hard for them to fill vacancies as well as making it hard for young people to get their first job. It is vital that employers start thinking about recruitment differently."
The trust also hopes to train young people for the social-care sector, which employers fear suffers because it doesn't carry the same prestige as the NHS. The training organisation Skills for Care estimates there is a shortage of 11,500 staff in adult social care in the West Midlands region alone.
Jagdeep Khatkar, director of Oakview care home, in the Birmingham suburb of Quinton, has begun to hire younger staff from his home city. He said: "The sector has had a bit of a PR issue in the past. It's important that we now appeal to the younger people in particular and show that there is a real career path for young people to follow.”
