Youth Guarantee Wins Strong Support

Youth Guarantee wins strong support: The youth guarantee, which ensures all people under 25 get a job, apprenticeship, traineeship, or continued education offer within four months of leaving school or becoming unemployed, was appreciated by younger Europeans. Since then, lots of youth services have been in touch to say millions have benefitted from the scheme. However, no individual beneficiary identified themselves, which highlights a persistent EU problem: when it does good, most people don’t realize how the good was made possible.

According to Eurostat figures, in May 2016 there were 4,197 million unemployed young people (18.6%) in the EU-28. Although an improvement on the previous year (20.3%), the figure remains appalling and shows that the threat of a "lost generation", which has loomed large since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis, is still hanging dangerously over Europe. Despite this, businesses across the EU are struggling to find young people with the skills they need.

To tackle this twofold problem, the European Economic and Social Affairs (EESC) believes that a European skills offensive is needed. This should aim to combat the mismatch between the skills in demand on the labour market and young people's actual skills when they enter it. The EESC is persuaded that the key ingredients of a strategy to solve this pressing problem should include an education to entrepreneurship and the enhancement of ICT and soft skills, a well-functioning apprenticeship system and measures facilitating mobility.

Entrepreneurship education should aim to give all learners the opportunity to develop the range of skills and competences required of entrepreneurs, including a sense of initiative, the ability to turn ideas into action, creativity, innovation, risk-taking, management, communication and team work expertise. It should be included at all levels of education and training so as to enable the continuous development of these skills across the curriculum.  Digital knowledge and skills are now a core part of everyone's economic and social lives and should likewise cover all stages and forms of education.

Well-functioning apprenticeships and other quality forms of work-based learning can help young people make a smoother transition from school to employment. Dual learning systems have proven to be very effective in this respect and Member States which do not have such systems should explore the costs involved in developing them, compared with the benefits for companies' competitiveness and young peoples’ job opportunities.