The reports "Youth in transition: identifying profiles and characteristics to tap into young people's potential in the SEMED region" and "Unlocking youth potential in south-eastern Europe and Turkey: skills development for the labour market and social inclusion" both focus on young people and their interactions with the labour markets in some of the EU neighbourhood countries. Despite analysing two different regions, many common findings can be extracted from the two reports.
Firstly, even if countries in the SEMED and SEET regions tried in the recent past to improve and make the school work transition smoother, those countries are still facing huge problems regarding this aspect. Youth joblessness, precarious employment and informal working are widespread amongst the regions. The countries' education systems fall short in addressing the labour markets' request and needs, and employers lament a lack of relevant skills by the majority of young people. Even youth with tertiary education often lack some of the essential skills to start working. When it comes to tertiary education, it is possible to notice a paradox.
At least as proved in some SEMED countries, on the one hand, young people with educational attainment above the secondary level have the best employment outlook but, on the other, the unemployment rates go up the higher is someone's educational level. The faculty's choice might have a severe impact on the possibility of finding a proper job. Students coming from highly saturated specialisation, such as literature, history, and religious studies, are unable to find work that suits their qualifications. As a result, many highly educated graduates must accept positions below their level of formal qualifications or remain unemployed. Generally speaking, both the regions are affected by a massive problem of lack of job match and vertical and horizontal skills mismatch. Additionally, there is an absence of entrepreneurial and other soft and transversal skills education, which pushes the youth to prefer to work for the public sector or as an employee for the private one, instead of setting up their own business. Additionally, countries in the two regions usually do not provide the needed support to young entrepreneurs willing to create their own business (or at least this is the common perception).
Another major issue common to most SEET and SEMED countries is the high rate of NEETs amongst the young. While in SEET the NEETs numbers have been declining in recent years, in SEMED their numbers have been consistent throughout the years. Usually, women and people with low education and coming from a disadvantaged socio-economic background are the most likely to become NEETS. High rates of NEETS reflect the lack of inclusiveness of the regions' labour markets and their incapacity to generate enough job for a part of their population, especially when it comes to high-quality jobs. In this regard, a significant portion of NEETS is represented by graduates who do not find a position aligned with their studies, ambition and capabilities and try to wait for good opportunities. The shortage of job opportunities pushes young from the SEMED and SEET regions to emigrate, despite a different attitude regarding emigration in the two areas (SEET youth is more willing to move than the SEMED one). This creates a massive phenomenon of brain drains from many countries in the two regions. The emigration of part of the young population is one reason why several SEET and SEMED countries are facing a demographic decline.
The last common challenge regards the impact of COVID-19 in the two regions. As in most of the world, the pandemic is hurting youth's employment in SEET and SEMED countries. Millions of young people have lost their jobs or are forced into temporary and not protected jobs. Nevertheless, the health crisis accelerates some crucial trends in the labour markets, highlighting the importance and relevance of some new competencies for working, such as digital and linguistic skills. Since those competencies are usually more common amongst the young population rather than the current working force, there is a chance that the COVID-19 health crisis might create more space and opportunity for those youths who possess certain specific skills. The pandemic outcomes are hard to foresee, but the chance that it will shape the labour market even after its ending is relatively high.
To sum up, the two reports showed, interestingly, common results amongst two very different regions. Undoubtedly, there are many differences between the SEMED and SEET regions (for example, labour markets in SEMED countries are also severely affected by socio-political unrest) and between countries belonging to the same region (e.g. many of the findings common to all the SEMED countries are not present in Israel). Nevertheless, the presence of several shared results and trends should make us wonder whether this is just a coincidence or if these are common features of the labour markets that can be observed between different regions or even at the global level, and if sharing more insights and good practices could be taken as a tool to leverage existing initiative and learning from each other.
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