Can AI build a train? No. But you could.
29 July 2026 · Graeme Goulden
Yesterday, Andy Burnham delivered an update from Alstom's train factory in Derby, hi-vis and all, and asked a simple question: can AI build a train?
Obviously his point was hard to argue with. As he followed-up, AI can indeed write your essay, it can draft your report, summarise your meeting and tidy up your emails. What it can't do is weld a chassis, wire a cab, or run a depot. Somebody with specifically skilled hands has to do that and we need a lot more of those somebodies.
And that post came with a real announcement. From age 14, pupils in England will be able to study technical subjects like manufacturing and AI alongside the academic core, on courses shaped with local employers, modelled on the MBacc he built in Greater Manchester. His argument was that an education system built for so long around the university route has left some young people feeling like "second-class citizens".
We didn't just watch it and nod along, we were out of our seats. This is the argument we've been making since the day we founded Hike and hearing it from the Prime Minister, on a factory floor, in his first weeks, tells us the country is finally ready to have it properly. So let's have it. Because there's a piece of this puzzle we know we can help solve and we're itching to get at it.
The question behind the question
There's a version of the careers conversation right now that quietly assumes the future of work happens entirely on a screen. That if you're not coding, prompting or presenting then you're on the wrong side of history. It's nonsense and the Prime Minister has just made rejecting it a matter of government policy.
The UK needs engineers, electricians, builders, carers, drivers, technicians. It needs people who make things and fix things and look after people. Those careers deserve the same ambition, the same aspiration, and the same quality of guidance as any graduate scheme in a glass tower.
But here's the bit the video doesn't cover and this bit is really, really important. Before anyone gets to build a train, they have to get through the system that guards the door. The application portal. The CV sift. The interview panel. The entry level role that somehow demands two years of experience.
AI can't build a train. The system standing between a young person and the factory floor is broken all the same and it's broken in exactly the same way whether the job at the end of it involves a hard hat or a headset.
We wrote about this a few weeks ago
When the Milburn review landed, we set out the numbers. Nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training. 84% of them want to work. Apprenticeships down 35% in a decade. A government spending £25 cleaning up youth unemployment for every £1 it spends preventing it.
Those numbers don't discriminate by career path. The eighteen year old who wants to be a rail engineer is stuck in the same experience trap as the graduate who wants to work in marketing. Both are being told they're not enough by a process that never really looked at them.
And here's the timing challenge that gets us up in the morning. The government says the new pathways could be up and running in some areas by 2028. Genuinely good news for today's Year 7s. But if you're 19 and out of work right now, 2028 might as well be another lifetime. Policy moves in years but a young person's confidence can erode in weeks, even days - and what impact does that have years from now? Somebody has to live in that gap, and we built Hike to do exactly that. We're in Manchester, the place this whole model was piloted, and we are ready to go today, not 2028. Today.
Where we stand
Hike doesn't have a preferred type of career. We genuinely don't care whether you want to manufacture trains, manage a ward, run a kitchen or build software. If you want to work, we've got your back. And that's our deal to you.
And we're clear eyed about what AI is for. At Hike, AI does the paperwork side of the fight; it tells you honestly whether a role fits before you burn a week on the application. It takes the experience you already have and makes it visible in the language an employer is looking for. It preps you for the interview so the anxiety doesn't get a vote and it's a coach in your corner when there's nobody else to ask.
Then you go and do the part only a human can do. You turn up, you shake the hand, you do the work. You build the train.
The Prime Minister asked whether AI can build a train. It can't. But it can help make sure the person who could build it actually gets the chance to. That's the problem we're solving, from Manchester, right now, and we honestly can't think of anything we'd rather be building.
If that's you
Everything on Hike and our Graduates solution is there for you. Try it.
Whatever you want to build, nobody gets left behind.