Abdisalam Iman, a young man who was seeking work at an employment fair in Digbeth, said he felt there was support available, if you went looking for it.
But he found applying for jobs online to be difficult.
He said: “I used to work in railway construction, I’d been there working for nearly one year and now it went a bit quiet and I need to do something different.”
While there were opportunities to work one or two days a week in Birmingham, he said he was finding it hard to find employers offering more than that.
Across the West Midlands it is estimated there are 78,000 people aged 16-18 not in education, employment, or training, which is just under one in eight people in that age group.
Zoe-Lane Littlewood from the Teamworks Hub, which helps young people find employment, said there were “not enough organisations taking a chance on them, helping them develop their skills little by little”.
She said: “I think we expect people to be fully-fledged, ready to work when in actuality we’ve had Covid, we’ve had so many obstacles that people just forget what young people have gone through.”