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Employment-intensive growth must be promoted
An effective policy for generating youth employment should be part of an overall strategy of employment creation through employment-intensive economic growth. Youth employment and unemployment are highly responsive to the economic cycle and the effects of low labour market demand are particularly problematic for out-of-school youth. It is necessary to adopt sound macroeconomic policies that promote overall employment growth as a basis for addressing the employment problems of young people.
Sound education, labour market
and social policies are necessary too
Education systems are crucial. Developing young people's employability is a key policy issue for ensuring their successful transition to the labour market and their access to career-oriented employment. Youth need to acquire the skills, knowledge and attitudes that will allow them to find work and to cope with unpredictable labour market changes throughout their working lives. Education systems play a crucial role in preparing youth for the labour market. However, completing upper secondary school is not a sufficient condition for stable entry into the labour market. In a number of countries, secondary school graduates can still be subject to considerable unemployment. Policy should focus on ensuring that young people are employable, both when they first enter the labour market and over time.
Exploiting opportunities
in the ICT sector
Information and communications technologies are opening up exciting new career prospects for young people, both as employees and entrepreneurs. In some countries, young people are already launching thousands of start-up companies that capitalize on technologies such as wireless telephones and the Internet. In developed countries, industry experts indicate that jobs exist in all areas of e-business including Java programming and web hosting, as well as in business support services. In developing countries, opportunities abound for exploiting the new technologies, offering an unprecedented chance for these countries to "leapfrog" earlier stages of development. For these benefits to be realized, however, countries need among other things, to expand their investment in infrastructure needed for the use of ICT and in the education and training of young people. Such investments should be undertaken by both the public and private sectors and make use of collaborative local, national and international networks.
Work experience while in education should be encouraged.
Linking part-time employment with classroom studies may also enhance students' motivation and educational attainment while allowing them to gain valuable work experience. Although school/work combinations may have a positive impact on young people's successful integration into employment, they have to be carefully supervised to ensure that the number of hours worked is not excessive. Methods for ensuring positive experiences range from apprenticeships to short ad hoc stays in enterprises while in school.
School dropout problems must be addressed.
Despite the efforts of countries to improve the employability of youth through the education system, a number still leave school with very limited skills. Research shows that exclusion from education, training and employment is often systemic: early school-leavers and other at-risk young people are often drawn disproportionately from particular ethnic, social and regional groups. These young people should be among the major preoccupations of policy-makers as they are particularly vulnerable to repeated spells of unemployment, long-term unemployment and intermittent and low-paid work. A key policy priority has been to discourage young people from dropping out of school or to encourage early school-leavers to return to regular education and training. Multifaceted programmes that combine services ranging from remedial education and training to work experience and support for returning to formal education and various forms of wage subsidies have been increasingly adopted in some countries.
Vocational training and education must be relevant to labour market needs.
Many countries have become increasingly concerned with how initial education and training are keeping pace with changing qualification requirements in the labour market in an environment of rapid technological innovation, economic restructuring and keener competition. In response, countries with strong traditions of vocational education and training have been attempting to adjust the content of education. They are placing increased emphasis on the design or redesign of new skills profiles and faster and more flexible ways to update curricula and qualifications. In countries with less developed vocational education sectors, efforts have been made to create better linkages between education and employment through the development of unified qualification frameworks within which to judge attainments. These are geared at providing the information and incentive structures needed to spur student achievement and continuous learning. A system of national standards also helps employers in informing training providers and prospective employees of their skill needs and in evaluating the skill levels of applicants.
Training opportunities for young women must be expanded.
Young women, particularly in developing countries, are often unable to take advantage of training opportunities due to barriers to entry, discrimination in selection and gender stereotyping. Stereotyping is frequently found in vocational guidance and counselling on the part of school staff or employment services, which encourage young women away from training programmes that would have led them to higher long-term earnings and status. In many countries, for example, young women are encouraged to train in household-related work, such as food preparation and garment manufacturing, while young men are encouraged to go for high-skill and modern technology-based training and employment. As a result, many young women end up in relatively low-skilled and poorly paid occupations with little prospect of upward mobility. Improved access will help increase the employability of young women. It must be supplemented by vocational guidance better suited to their capabilities and needs, as well as by gender-sensitive counselling and placement services to enable young women to fulfil their potential.
Training must be a part of an integrated package.
Evaluations of training programmes show that they have had limited success in raising incomes and job offers for young unemployed people. This is not surprising. Poor skills are only one of a myriad of factors leading to youth unemployment. Labour market policies for young workers need therefore to include training as part of an integrated and targeted package. Targeted programmes that combine work experience with classroom training and job search and career counselling can also be effective for many unemployed young people who require help in attaining the social skills and work habits needed to obtain decent work. Such schemes seem particularly effective in economies where a demand exists for low or semi-skilled workers and where economic growth is relatively high. This has been the situation in recent years in a number of industrializing countries of Asia and Latin America.
Entrepreneurship development
While youth entrepreneurship is not a cure-all for youth unemployment, it can assist in reducing youth unemployment and improving the employability of young people. Effective youth enterprise programmes should address key elements necessary in creating and sustaining new viable enterprises, including adequate funding, skills training, business expansion support, creation of support networks, business counselling and mentor support. Youth unemployment is often concentrated in geographical areas of severe deprivation. Youth entrepreneurship programmes can offer considerable social benefits in terms of reduced youth unemployment and can impact favourably on the area's economic development. An area-based approach to youth entrepreneurship has been receiving particular attention from policy-makers.
The ILO has developed a training package, Know About Business, an extensive entrepreneurship awareness package for young trainees at vocational and technical training institutions. The aim of the training package is to encourage young people to choose entrepreneurship or self-employment as a career option. It provides knowledge of the required attributes and challenges for starting and operating a successful business. The training package has been used in numerous vocational and technical training institutions in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Policies are needed to strengthen the demand for youth labour.
Wage-setting institutions, employment protection legislation, fixed-term contract regulations and the characteristics of the tax and benefit system are often deemed to affect youth entry into the labour market. Although education and training policies must be seen as the cornerstone of any effective strategy for improving youth labour market prospects, a comprehensive policy framework must pay attention to labour market arrangements and institutions and their impact on job and earning prospects. Furthermore, job opportunities may be created specifically for youth in public or non-profit sectors or financial and other assistance may be provided to foster youth entrepreneurship.
Labour market information and vocational guidance must be improved.
Both labour market information (LMI) and vocational guidance play influential roles, regardless of a country's stage of development. Improved knowledge about labour market opportunities - the nature and location of employment, wages and working conditions and opportunities and assistance in using the information - are vital to improved labour market operations. LMI and vocational guidance are especially critical for youth whose knowledge of, and exposure to the world of work is limited. LMI usage by skilled guidance counsellors can help increase the quantity and quality of job matches between employers and job seekers, reduce the spells and duration of unemployment and generally increase the efficiency of labour market operations.
Bridging the information gap
Young people face tough choices in what studies to undertake and what careers to pursue. Information on supply and demand for skills would assist them in making decisions regarding transitions from secondary to post-secondary studies, training or the workforce, and to take advantage of emerging labour market opportunities. But young people in many countries have difficulties in locating information suited to their particular needs. Sad to say, research in some countries shows that most of the information available to them is not very useful. One type of information usually missing concerns the linkages between education and labour market outcomes. This information gap needs to be closed by developing better LMI systems and by delivering the information to young people through written documents, school counselling, career workshops and the Internet.
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