A few days ago Pope Francis, enroute to the Catholic World Youth Day in Brazil, warned of a global crisis of unemployed Young people. He said we run the risk of losing an entire generation of young people to unemployment. The pope has probably had a look at the OECD 2013 youth employment projections where Spain and Greece are expected to reach about 28 percent (in both countries) in 2014.
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The Economist also addressed this issue a couple months ago. It was reported that about 300 million 15-24 year olds around the world are without work. How did all this begin? What can we do about this crisis? Is it failure of individuals or system failure?
I think that a close look at the ways our schools and other institutions of learning operate and the ways employers (especially industry) seek out, recruit and retain workers may provide some clues. In this post, I will address the School system.
A fair portion of young people without work are those who may have left school early or had to leave prematurely. Others have in fact attended university or a college and still find themselves jobless.
A key problem may be the expectation that spending a few years at university or college equips one for the world of work. It turns out that a whole new mindset is now required to avoid the unemployment trap. Young people should be encouraged to reach an engagement level where they aim to do something with what they know other than simply passing knowledge tests and qualification certificates.
Tony Wagner, a Harvard professor has outlined the skills our schools and homes should seek to impart if young people are to innovate in an increasingly competitive world. They are: critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration across networks, agility and adaptability, entrepreneurism, effective oral and written communication, how to access and analyze information and curiosity and imagination.
School experiences of young people should engage them in real work and prepare them to work, not to seek work. The management consultant Charles Handy has observed that the work of the future is portfolio work. A portfolio worker will not depend on an employer in the long term. They will only look for individuals who require their services and once they get a job done (probably short contract), they move on to the next task. We can already see the rise of freelance work with such sites as oDesk and Elance.
Finally it is time to reform our schools to reflect the new circumstances in which we live. We must prepare young people to perform in the real world and not simply remember facts here and there.
This, in my view, is one way to deal with the crisis of youth unemployment.
