Over the past twelve months, two reports jump out on the issue of youth unemployment. The Youth Unemployment Challenge and Scaling the Youth Unemployment Challenge were both written by the UK Commission on Employment and Skills and go into the problems faced by people aged 16 – 24 in the UK today.
On a global level, the International Labour Organisation note that there are 75 million young people who are unemployed across the world. Matched with the World Bank’s statistics that there are 621 million people of all ages either not in education or employment in the world today and, in order to sustain current levels of employment, we need to create a further 600 million jobs in the next 15 years. Further, by looking at the data on Europe at a national level, you can also note the trends and gaps in skill provision which allows you to suggest where the most jobs will be.
These numbers are important for many reasons. Not least because it highlights the scale of the issue facing people in the field of employment, but also, because it points to some of the solutions.
For example, if we know that if we want to reach full global employment and education in 15 years, we need 1.2 billion opportunities to be created, the idea that we should focus solely on ‘employment’ or getting people into jobs that already exist, then we won’t succeed. In the UK, only 4.8 per cent of graduates class themselves as self-employed according to the ‘what do graduates do?’ survey released annually. Based on these figures, we know that not enough graduates are thinking or acting entrepreneurially. Similarly, we know that a large proportion of graduates will work for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), however, they are less well advertised as compared to other large graduate recruiters.
Similarly, when you start to look deeper into some of the labour market demands, in the UK at least, you realise that there is room for growth but a limited supply of talent, which is restricting that ability to grow. The Social Market Foundation noted in March 2013 that in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) study-leavers, 104,000 STEM graduates and 56,000 STEM technicians were needed annually in the lead up to 2020 to fill current skills gaps. They then admit that this still leaves a gap in the broader economy which would require a further increase in skilled labour. This is just one example of a gulf between supply and demand in talent which needs to be plugged. It’s not just the general economy that is adding to the employment problem, but, other factors including the education system which is exacerbating the problem.
Professor Sir Ken Robinson, who rose to notoriety by delivering a TED lecture on the subject, expresses the problems that link the education system and the economy at large very well in a series of videos. Beginning with a speech on schools then looking more broadly at problems with the education system he outlines the problems. Similarly, through work with the RSA in the UK, his work was turned into an animation which explores many different aspects of his thinking.
There are lots of general pieces of research which we’d recommend you look at, but these act as an excellent introduction to anyone trying to grapple with the big problems around education and how it links to employment.