G20 Labour and Employment Ministerial Meeting

G20: Promoting better labour market outcomes for youth

Joint ILO-OECD background paper on youth employment and apprenticeship prepared for the G20 Labour and Employment Ministerial Meeting held in Melbourne, Australia, 10-11 September 2014.

All G20 economies face considerable challenges in ensuring that young people are well integrated into the world of work. In some, the key challenges are to lower youth unemployment and improve access to either work or study. In others, it is to raise the skills of youth and to improve access to quality jobs, often in the context of a large and growing cohort of youth entering the labour market.

These challenges have become even more daunting over the past years as the global financial and economic crisis hit youth particularly hard in most G20 economies and it is only recently that their situation in the labour market has begun to improve even if in some cases only marginally.