McDonald's has faced jibes that it offers low tech, low paid McJobs that add little to the country's skills base
The boss of McDonald's in the UK is urging more businesses to recruit school leavers and end decades of snobbery that favoured graduates.
Jill McDonald said it was time to drop hackneyed clichés that put all teenagers in hoodies and belittled their qualifications by calling them "dumbed down". She said thousands of teenagers who joined the burger chain each year were bright and desperate to learn.
More than half the executive team at the US-owned business started in one of its 1,200 restaurants and 90% of restaurant managers joined as trainees.
McDonald's has faced jibes that it offers low tech, low paid McJobs that add little to the country's skills base. When it received the go-ahead several years ago to offer its own NVQ qualifications overseen by the schools regulator Ofsted, many commentators scoffed that it was accelerating the dumbing down of skills training.
But McDonald, who is British, told the Institute of Directors annual conference that companies were missing out on a huge pool of talent when they failed to look beyond graduate recruits to young people who often failed at school through no fault of their own.
It has 6,000 to 7,000 vacancies at any one time and 15 applicants for every job. More than 16,000 staff are studying for the Ofsted recognised qualifications.
McDonald said: "We now see the equivalent of six full classes gain adult certificates in maths and English every week and we've now awarded 3,000 Level 2 Apprenticeships in hospitality."
She told the conference, also attended by the chancellor George Osborne and his shadow Ed Balls, that "we need to acknowledge the road many young people take today may not be the one we took in the past.
"We need to remove the snobbery that does down workplace learning. For many put off by high fees, this could and should be the route they take."
Her comments came as youth unemployment stands just below the one million mark at about 20% of the population aged between 16 and 24, according to latest government figures. The unemployment rate for graduates has doubled from 10% to 20% since the economic downturn started.
McDonald said that in many deprived parts of the country heavily dependent on the public sector, companies such as McDonald's "offer not just jobs but careers".
She cited the example of one employee, a 22-year-old part-time worker Alix Potts, who was also training to be a hairdresser. Ms McDonald said: "Alix decided to join us full time, becoming one of our first apprentices and in the process gained better qualifications than she'd left school with."
She added: "The truth is that as the worlds of business and education move ever closer, companies like ours are becoming educators as well as employers.