How your voice can address youth unemployment

Young people are graduating unprepared to succeed in a world of rapidly changing socioeconomic times demanding new skills and behaviours. Systematic youth unemployment is robbing nations of their human potential. How will we change the systems that develop our youth and enable them to live more productive and fulfilling lives?

In an International Labour Organization (ILO) report on 2015 employment trends, it found that the outlook for global employment will deteriorate in the coming five years. Over 201 million were unemployed in 2014 around the world, over 31 million more than before the start of the global crisis. And, global unemployment is expected to increase by 3 million in 2015 and by a further 8 million in the following four years. Youth, especially young women, continue to be disproportionately affected by unemployment. Almost 74 million young people (aged 15–24) were looking for work in 2014. The youth unemployment rate is practically three times higher than is the case for their adult counterparts. The heightened youth unemployment situation is common to all regions and is occurring despite the trend improvement in educational attainment, thereby fuelling social discontent.

Despite rising educational enrollments and attainment, how do we address the fact that young people leave their educational years with the lack of employment readiness, to find productive and quality employment.

Across the world, education remains the #1 priority of young people as found in the UN My World survey of 7M+ youth, and our live YouthSpeak survey of 35K respondents. Education is perhaps the most prioritize issue because of the significant time and investments needed to acquire a degree, and the lack of value connected to education supporting their youth employment outlook. Education is essential to the development of a society, but the output of the experience is currently not fully aligned with the realities of a modern world that demands a whole new set of skills.

We need young people to voice their opinions if we are to shape the future of youth development, redefine education systems and align the needs of employers, youth and education. This is the lack week of our Global YouthSpeak survey and not too far away from our goal of 50K.

You can join this global youth movement and help shape the future of youth development by adding your voice to our Thunderclap to launch #YouthSpeak day below.

Take the Global YouthSpeak survey: Click here