The current economic slowdown in Europe has stimulated political action to find ways of easing the entry of young people in the labour market.
In some EU countries like Italy, Portugal and Spain youth unemployment exceeds the 25 per cent mark. In Malta, 13.7 per cent of young people are unemployed. This is high enough to call for special action to help more young people make an early entry into the labour market.
The response of the government to the sobering reality of high youth unemployment is a strategy to help young people “successfully integrate into the labour market”. The education minister announced a series of measures that will characterise this strategy.
Some measures aim at helping young people acquire soft skills like “confidence and assertiveness”. Youngsters “from vulnerable backgrounds” will be given “extra support and assistance” in the form of professional help to ensure that they are not discriminated against when applying for jobs.
In the more acute cases, disadvantaged young people will be “offered life skills for independent living while being supported through training and job coaching”.
One very revealing outcome of the consultation that the Ministry of Education conducted prior to the formulation of this strategy is that young people “indicated a skills mismatch between what they were learning at school and the qualities needed when they came to the employment market”. This reality says a lot about the effectiveness of our educational system including our vocational education.
The Economist recently reported on the findings of the management consultancy firm McKinsey that tried to find the reason behind the skills gap phenomenon that exists in various EU countries. The conclusions of McKinsey were: “A big part of the problem is that educators and employers operate in parallel universes – and the big part of the solution lies in bringing these two universes together: obliging educators to step into employers’ shoes, employers to step into educators’, and students to move between the two.”
While the strategic measures announced by the government go a long way into easing the entry of more disadvantaged young people in the labour market, the National Youth Employment Strategy 2015 needs to address more thoroughly the unemployment and underemployment that affects many qualified young people who fail to find suitable employment that meets their aspirations.
We may need other strategic measures to tackle youth unemployment more effectively. We need, for instance, an educational campaign among parents and students alike to dispel the myth that academic education is for bright students while vocational education is for the less gifted young people. Academic drift is one of the most powerful forces in educational life.
We need to acknowledge that in our case this drift has left us with a cohort of younger workers with excellent academic qualifications, but working in dead-end unsatisfying jobs. This may not be as bad as being unemployed, but it certainly is a failure of our educational as well as our employment strategies.
It is also a sad reality that we have a large number of young people who are neither academically qualified nor have a sufficient skills base to find suitable employment. This is unjust and wasteful at a time when we need to optimise our human and financial resources.
Employers too need to do more to bridge the skills gap. For once they need to look beyond the bottom line and invest time and money to give young people a chance to acquire practical skills in the workplace.