Educational Jobs Youth And Employability In The Social Economy

In Europe the social economy employs almost 15 million workers. During the crisis years, unlike other sectors, it has often generated an increase in jobs. The aim of this comparative study is to investigate how to allow the supply and demand for young people to meet in the different types of social economy bodies. In particular, it concentrates on the problem of how to bring into line initial university training and the skills required by these organizations. The focus is placed on the varied family of training workers present in at least 75% of the organizations, whose professionalism is nevertheless rarely acknowledged. The papers proposed in this book try to identify the most suitable solutions at the level of curriculum, career development and accompanying measures, while drawing solutions from objective findings and not from training system needs or convictions.

The economic status of young people has declined significantly over the past two decades, despite a variety of programs designed to aid new workers in the transition from the classroom to the job market. This ongoing problem has proved difficult to explain. Drawing on comparative data from Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, these papers go beyond examining only employment and wages and explore the effects of family background, education and training, social expectations, and crime on youth employment. This volume brings together key studies, providing detailed analyses of the difficult economic situation plaguing young workers. Why have demographic changes and additional schooling failed to resolve youth unemployment? How effective have those economic policies been which aimed to improve the labor skills and marketability of young people? And how have youths themselves responded to the deteriorating job market confronting them? These questions form the empirical and organizational bases upon which these studies are founded.

While overall unemployment has declined, the unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high for young people 16 to 19 years of age and nearly three times as high for those aged 20 to 24. Rates of unemployment and underemployment are nearly two to three times higher for Black and Latino youth. In Youth, Jobs, and the Future, Lynn S. Chancer, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, and Christine Trost have gathered a cast of well-known interdisciplinary scholars to confront the persistent issues of youth unemployment and worsening socio-economic precarity in the United States. The book explores structural and cultural causes of youth unemployment, their ramifications for both native and immigrant youth, and how middle- and working-class youth across diverse races and ethnicities are affected within and outside the legal economy. A needed contribution, this book locates solutions to youth unemployment in economic and political changes as well as changes in cultural attitudes.

“The education to work transition of young people is key to a successful work-life and to fight youth unemployment. The book provides an impressive outline of the facts and convincing insights of the potential causes. This offers a large and broader audience help to adjust properly to achieve a better life.” Klaus F. Zimmermann, IZA, Bonn, Germany This work points to the youth experience gap as a key concept to explain the meager employment opportunities and earnings many young people face.The transition from education to work remains a long dark tunnel around the world. However, this book shows that there are striking differences between countries: in Germany, the young people of today are no worse off than their adult counterparts, while in Southern European and Eastern European countries they fare 3 through 4 times worse. The current economic and financial crisis has further exacerbated the situation for young people in many advanced economies. Observers are divided as to the optimal design of youth employment policy. Liberalists believe that the market itself should address youth disadvantages. More flexible labor markets should also guarantee greater labor turnover, including temporary work, so as to allow young people to move from one job to the next until they accumulate the work experience they need to become more employable and find the right career. In contrast, other economists oppose approaches focusing on entry flexibility and temporary work, claiming that the former type helps only the most skilled and motivated target groups, while the latter only allows young people to gather generic, not job-specific work experience.

Based on up to date qualitative and ethnographic research, this book examines youth education-to-work transitions in the UK. Using the theoretical lens of a Foucauldian governmentality approach, the authors consider the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of youth employability training and demonstrate how different employability schemes planned and operationalised in diverse geographical and economic landscapes work in practice. The book examines and compares a range of employment entry route programmes and reveals the tension between employability and good quality employment, and the ways in which young people from varying social and regional backgrounds are positioned very differently within this.

This concluding report of the Jobs for Youth series analyses the situation of youth employment and unemployment in the context of the jobs crisis and identifies successful policy measures in OECD countries as well as structural reforms in education and in the labour market that can help.

The book covers the vocational training and employment of young workers in various European and North American advanced economies; the forms taken by regulation of youth economic activity and the effects of its deregulation; training systems, training policies and access to skilled work in various paired-country comparisons; and the links between trade unions and young workers in two country-specific case-studies.

The book is the final report of the researches, discussions, conversations around and about the Project PRIN Employability & Competences which took place on March 9th-­‐11th, 2017 within an International Conference at the University of Florence. It was the final event of the project PRIN2012LATR9N which aims were: «to design innovative programs for higher education, to promote personalized and learner-centered teaching and learning, to build on job competencies, to value talents to create new work opportunities, to support young adults during their employment emergency, as a response to socio economic crisis and as a citizenship action». The research activities concerned the main phases of the students’ academic life: career guidance upon entry, personalized teaching, career calling, professional vocation, profession building activities such as internships and work related experiences, and lastly job placement.