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Britain’s defence chief calls on Gen Z grads leaving university to skip corporate jobs and join the military as war with Russia becomes a growing risk

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College graduates are stepping out of university and into an uncertain labor market—but the U.K.’s chief of defence says the government’s defence department is ready to employ them with open arms. 

While warning the nation of the escalating potential of conflict with Russia, Sir Richard Knighton stressed that the U.K.’s defence “cannot be outsourced to the armed forces,” and called on young citizens to step up. 

He went as far as urging teenagers and graduates to ditch the corporate careers they may have been studying for, to join the military and help “meet the demands in the U.K. and of our allies to re-stock and re-arm.”

“Building this industrial capacity also means we need more people who leave schools and universities to join that industry,” Knighton said recently at a Royal United Services Institute event in Westminster. 

The head of the military even asked parents to actively steer their children toward careers in defence. 

“We need defence and political leaders to explain the importance of the industry to the nation, and we need schools and parents to encourage children and young adults to take up careers in the industry.”

More than a rally call: The government will target Gen Z with $66.7 million initiative 

Asking Gen Zers to do a career-180 and enter the arms industry is a tall order—but the U.K. government is putting its money where its mouth is. The nation is rolling out a new initiative to train teenagers as young as 16 in military technology. 

Speaking on a recent report that found that the U.K. has a “perilous skills gap” in engineering, Knighton acknowledged a critical need to collaborate with the industry and budding Gen Z professionals. 

He just announced that the U.K. government will invest £50 million ($66.7 million) into new defence technical excellence colleges (TECs).

It’s an intentional strategy to not only develop in-demand skills domestically, but also ensure that graduates have a better shot at employment—a much-needed opportunity as the country grapples with alarming Gen Z joblessness. 

The tough labor market for the U.K.’s Gen Z graduates 

Ambitious Gen Z professionals are up against an incredibly weak labor market. The U.K.’s youth unemployment surged to the highest rate in over a decade, as the jobless rate among 16 to 24 year-olds climbed to 16% in the three months leading to October. It’s the highest rate of unemployed young people the country has seen since 2015, with 735,000 of these Gen Zers out of work. 

Even those who attended college in pursuit of six-figure office jobs are having a rough go. It’s estimated that 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 U.K. graduate roles in 2023/2024, according to research from the Institute of Student Employers (ISE). Comparatively, 559,959 candidates were interviewed for graduate roles in 2021/2022, with U.K. employers hiring 19,646 of them. Within just a couple of years, these entry-level opportunities shrank by the thousands, while double the amount of talent entered the highly competitive job hunt. Last year marked the highest number of applications per job ever recorded since the ISE started tracking the data back in 1991.

“There are many graduates now that are coming out of universities, which means that there are more people that are graduating necessarily for the jobs that are there,” Rob Breare, CEO of independent U.K. school system Malvern College International, said onstage at the Fortune Global Forum conference in October.

As white-collar jobs are in short supply, the U.K. government’s push for more Gen Zers to enter the arms industry could be a welcome one. 

The nation’s $66.7 million investment in specialty defense tech schools is just a drop in the bucket of its $965 million strategy to get young professionals into work. Last week, the government announced a nearly billion-dollar initiative to create more apprenticeships, and place 50,000 young people jobs in critical fields like AI, engineering, and hospitality. 

The country is rewriting the norm that a cushy office job is the only failsafe career. And as the government looks to expand its defense capabilities and job opportunities, Gen Z could find greater success pivoting from the corporate job hunt.



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The Epstein files are heavily redacted, including contact info for Trump, celebs, and bankers

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December 19, 2025

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The highly anticipated Epstein files have so far landed with a thud as page after page of documents have been blacked out, with many nearly totally redacted.

While hundreds of thousands of documents have been released so far on the Justice Department’s site housing the information, there isn’t that much to see.

“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why.”

That appeared to refer to a document titled “Grand Jury NY.” 

The data dump came late Friday, the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the trove of files, though other documents had already been released earlier by the DOJ, Congress and the Epstein estate.

One document listed thousands of names with their contact information redacted, including Donald Trump as well as Ivana and Ivanka Trump.

Numerous celebrities were also in that document, such as Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger and the late pop idol Michael Jackson, who also appeared in photos with Epstein.

Former Senators John Kerry and George Mitchell were on the list as were Jes Staley, a former JPMorgan and Barclays executive, and Leon Black, a cofounder and former CEO of Apollo Global Management.

Appearing in the files doesn’t necessarily imply any wrongdoing as Epstein mingled in wider social circles and was ofter asked for charitable donations.

But Staley said he had sex with a member of Epstein’s staff, and Black was pushed out of Apollo over his Epstein ties, which Black maintains were for tax- and estate-planning services.

Numerous hotels, clubs and restaurants are listed too, plus locations simply described as “massage.” Banks included the now defunct Colonial Bank as well as Bear Stearns and Chemical Bank, which both eventually became part of JPMorgan.

Other entries fell under country categories like Brazil, France, Italy and Israel. Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak were on the list.



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Epstein files: Trump, Clinton, Summers, Gates not returning any results in search bar

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December 19, 2025

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The Justice Department released a massive trove of files related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, but the site housing the information was failing to turn up any results.

The data dump came on the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the highly anticipated information, though a top Justice official suggested that not all the documents would come out at once with more due in the coming weeks.

While President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and scores of other powerful men have been linked to Epstein, their names failed to come up in a search of DOJ’s “Epstein Library.”

“No results found. Please try a different search,” the site says after queries for their names.

The site adds that “Due to technical limitations and the format of certain materials (e.g., handwritten text), portions of these documents may not be electronically searchable or may produce unreliable search results.”

However, Clinton also appears in photos that were released as does the late pop singer Michael Jackson. Other records were heavily redacted.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.

Last month, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in Congress produced legislation to force the Trump administration to release the DOJ files, though emails and photos from Epstein’s estate had already come out.

One of the sponsors of that legislation, Rep. Ro Khanna, warned on Friday that if DOJ doesn’t show that it’s complying with the law, Congress could hold impeachment hearings for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Blanche.

Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Want a job in AI-era tech? Forget prestigious degrees—tech leaders want to see your GitHub projects and internships

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December 19, 2025

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For decades, computer science has been sold as one of the surest paths to economic security. And leaders across politics and industry—from former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—have at times urged students not to overlook the field, framing coding skills as the secret to stable, high-paying jobs.

But as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the workplace, that promise is starting to look less certain.

A new survey of more than 200 engineering leaders, conducted by tech training nonprofit CodePath and shared exclusively with Fortune, shows entry-level tech hiring is slowing. More than one-third of respondents, 38%, said their company has reduced the number of entry-level hiring over the past year, and nearly 1 in 7 reported pausing Gen Z hiring altogether.

At the same time, 18% said hiring had stayed the same, and 8% reported an increase. Despite the overall slowdown, CodePath CEO Michael Ellison—a Y Combinator alum—argues telling people to avoid tech right now would be a mistake.

“That’s just kind of like taking crazy pills if you end up choosing not to invest in the tools that make you the most powerful—of telling computers what you want them to do in an age where computers are becoming exponentially more powerful,” Ellison told Fortune. “So to me, it’s like saying, ‘don’t learn how to use the internet.’”

Ellison’s argument reflects a broader shift in how computer science fits into the AI economy. As generative AI tools become more capable, understanding how software works—and how to direct, customize, and integrate AI systems—is increasingly seen as a foundational skill rather than a specialized one.

That demand is already showing up in the labor market. AI literacy topped LinkedIn’s list of the skills professionals are prioritizing and companies are hiring for right now. And a Lightcast analysis of more than 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered an average of $18,000 more in annual compensation that those that did not.

Notably, the majority of those roles were outside the tech sector. Some 51% of jobs requiring AI skills were in non-tech industries, up from 44% in 2022—a sign coding and AI fluency are becoming relevant far beyond Silicon Valley.

The new secret to landing a tech job

Still, slowing hiring doesn’t mean aspiring technologists should give up. Instead, the CodePath data suggests candidates may need to rethink what they emphasize—and what they leave off—when applying for tech roles.

When asked which signals matter most outside the interview process, engineering leaders indicated proof of real-world skills matter far more than formal credentials. Side projects or portfolios topped the list, cited by 38% of respondents, followed by internship experience (35%), and public code portfolios like GitHub (34%).

Traditional markers of achievement, by contrast, carried far less weight. Just 4% of leaders said credentialing programs were a top influence in hiring decisions, while only 23% cited a candidate degree or academic focus and 17% pointed to school prestige.

The shift away from pedigree suggests employers are seeking evidence candidates can actually do the work. Greater fluency with AI tools and frameworks was the most common skill expectation for early-career hires, followed by faster time to writing production-ready code and the ability to learn new tools or programming languages quickly.

And despite buzz about tech layoffs, job opportunities do still exist. The U.S. federal government, for example, recently announced it would be hiring about 1,000 new engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists. No degrees or work experience is required—and salaries will range from $150,000 to $200,000. Meta has also still been hiring young talent in recent weeks, with job postings for roles such as product software engineers.

Ellison’s advice for those seeking roles is simple: Opportunities are out there as long as you are willing to dig in deeper—and build a portfolio that hiring managers are looking for.

“People are rewarded for being aggressive and for going after what they want,” he said. It’s surprising the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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