What employers are doing to fight youth unemployment?

Peter Vogel

Peter Vogel is an entrepreneur, consultant and researcher at the University of St Gallen. 

He is the founder of Jobzippers and Entrepreneurs’ Ship that helps highlight youth employment issues and solutions. He is the author of the just-published book ”Generation Jobless – Turning the Youth Employment Crisis into Opportunity” .

MCE: Generation Jobless is a huge issue that just isn’t going to go away. If you were a business leader what do you think could be your (no matter how small) contribution to helping people into real work?

Peter Vogel (PV): Employers play a key role in tackling youth unemployment and there are many different things that can and have to be done on that front. However, the issue is everything but straightforward and solutions always require an orchestrated effort from various stakeholders, including employers but also public policy, educational institutions and of course young people, too.

In ‘Generation Jobless?’ I discuss dozens of examples of what employers are doing to fight youth unemployment. Overall, one can sum them up into the following action items:

Employers must

1.      Properly think through the actual ‘business case’ for hiring young people and balance the advantages and disadvantages. Overall, when taking a long-term perspective, they will come to the conclusion that it pays off to engage in young recruiting rather sooner than later. 
2.     Assume their responsibilities in preparing youth for the world of work by closely collaborating with the education system, providing internship and mentoring opportunities, giving lectures and talks in school, attending career fairs and other career-related events and open up their doors for young people. 
3.     Build a global skills supply chain in order to recruit for tomorrow’s needs instead of yesterday’s needs. 
4.     Ensure that they build adequate vocational training opportunities to counteract the increasing academization and help build relevant skills and capabilities on the job.
5.      Build a workforce management system that allows them to effectively work with four or five generations of employees.
6.     Ensure that there are sufficient youth-compatible jobs available in their companies, taking into account the Digital Natives’ characteristics and expectations from work. 
7.     Ensure that tomorrow’s leaders (i.e., the talents from today’s youth) find a stimulating and satisfying work environment in order to ensure continuity when the older managing employees are retiring. This needs to be done by building a 21^st century workplace.

MCE: You talk a lot about entrepreneurs and the vast reservoir of creative energy. How do we promote that in the school system to encourage people to try out new ideas and take risks?

PV: Entrepreneurship is considered one of the most promising avenues to solving the current youth labor market crisis. Why? Because it is one of the main drivers of innovation, economic and societal development and job creation.

As I argue in ‘Generation Jobless?’, the promotion of youth entrepreneurship is essential to tackling youth unemployment, because it…

•  …creates employment opportunities for those that start the businesses as well as those that they employ, particularly because young entrepreneurs are more prone to hiring other young people
•  …brings back alienated and marginalized youth into the labor market
•  …helps address socio-psychological issues arising from unemployment
•  …helps youth develop new skills and professional experience that, in turn, can enhance their general employability
•  …revitalizes local communities through new products and services
• …capitalizes on the youth’s particular responsiveness to new trends and opportunities
• …keeps young and otherwise idle young people occupied, which is always better than not having anything to do leaving them feeling useless and without hope.

Promoting an entrepreneurial mindset early on in life – at school or at home – is the key to success when it comes to boosting youth entrepreneurship. It therefore also cannot be considered a short-term solution to the crisis but rather a long-term strategic shift of the labor market.

To foster an entrepreneurial mindset, we need to…

• …make room for creativity and inspiration – at home, in school, and elsewhere.
• …give our kids the opportunity to develop financial literacy in a fun and playful way.
• …help them jump over their shadow and pro-actively engage in conversations.
• …foster their problem-solving skills by brainstorming solutions to their problems.
• …turn learning into a fun and playful setup to acquire important skills.
• …let them take responsibility and make decisions.
• …help them experience risk and their boundaries.
•  …allow our children to be critical about the status quo and come up with better ideas.

MCE:   For every well-educated kid out there, you’ll find another nine who are in the wrong place with the wrong qualifications at the wrong time. How do we get better at predicting where the new jobs will come from?

PV: Overall, we can say that the level of education is less an issue than the “match” between what is being taught and what is being looked for on the labor market. According to UNESCO, the Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) for Tertiary Education in Europe went up from around 50% in 1999 to above 70% in 2013. Of course this picture looks different in developing countries, but even on a global level it went up from 20% to over 30%.

Hence, in order to become better at predicting where new jobs will come from, employers need to spend significant time on predicting their future skills requirements – that is build a global skills supply chain. At the same time, the interaction between the employers and the education system must become more frequent and relevant. Unfortunately, we can observe a drift into theory at academic institutions, which further reduces the chances of teaching practical and relevant things. It is therefore even more important that employers get active and try to connect into the education system to shape what is being taught.

MCE:    And a simple question. If you are 16 years old what do you do to give yourself a better chance of climbing on the career ladder and being a success? What experience and what qualifications will win through?

PV: There are of course many evident steps that can be taken to enhance one’s employability, including internships, language courses, exchange programs, etc. However, this is a rather blunt advice that doesn’t seem to have done too much in helping the Gen Y and Gen Z in getting ready for the world of work. First of all, because there are not enough youth-specific job opportunities and second, because today’s youth has fundamentally different expectations from work than those 40 or 50 years ago. Hence, the best thing that young people can do is to try and develop a clear understanding of what they specifically want to do with their life and which career path is a realistic and interesting option for them – corporate, entrepreneurial, academic, political, etc. The better one gets at understanding one’s goals in life, the easier it gets to align the specific next steps to reach that goal. The current youth seems to have a particularly hard time to express their goals and ambitions. 

What makes now a great and successful leaders is not anymore the most important question.

Johan Beeckmans

Johan Beeckmans’s extensive international expertise in leadership, strategy and management development has been built over a 25 year career in key Human Resources roles and senior positions with international companies in the US and Europe. He is also Senior Associate at MCE and he talks about Leadership development. 

How to change the mindset?

What makes now a great and successful leaders is not anymore the most important question. It is about how to change the mindset? This can be done following the four step approach.

• Self-awareness

It is the basis of our knowledge about ourselves. With self-awareness we have a reasonable chance not only to develop good and solid social skills, but to start to change our mindset. Without it, there is unfortunately little chance to change the mindset. It is a journey that requires continuously building and refining a set of skills that allows people to guide, inspire, and work with others as well as making their plan for the “stages” they need to go through. It considers both horizontal and vertical development. 

Great managers have a wide range of competencies to draw on. They understand their strengths and weaknesses, their preferences, what makes them tick, what they avoid and how they learn. They know themselves well. Successful leaders learn from listening to others and from feedback. They are open to listen to feedback and make the necessary changes in their behaviors in order to plan their own stages of development.  And becoming a more complex thinker, they focus on vertical development i.e, the steps to become a more complex thinker.

•  Inspiring the Team 

Great managers and leaders know exactly what their role is in the team. They read the situation and understand what is needed from them. Great managers create a great atmosphere to work in. The manager – and their behaviors – has the biggest impact on team climate.  Team climate affects performance. It affects the amount of effort people in the team will contribute. The more they contribute, the more successful the team will be.  Positive climates encourage extra effort – negative climates inhibit it. High performance climates are characterized by individuals, who routinely do whatever it takes – who exceed expectations. Extended periods of poor climate may cause people to lose faith in the idea that things can improve, leading people to disengage from their jobs and the organization.  

•  Leading in a complex world

One of the things that matter, of course, is our capacity to hold and understand complexity. Leaders need to have the ability for each of us to hold the shades of grey complexity brings with it. Leadership is filled with so many shades of grey, so it matters that we can see those different shades. The complexity does not only comes fro the outside environment, but more so from the internal environment. Successful leader lead with mindfulness in their teams, organizations. This is the only way we can change happen in the organization. The reason that managers at higher levels of development are able to perform more effectively is that they can think in more complex ways.

•   Create your Personal Leadership Brand

Effective managers ask themselves: “What are the demands of my managerial situation?” Then they select the right leadership styles in response to the demands of the situation, considering:

ƒ. the experience and capability of team members

ƒ. the complexity of the task

ƒ. time pressures and resource availability

ƒ. the risks that result from under-performance

ƒ. the organization’s culture or norms.

Finally, they keep an open mind and observe their impact, watch out for changes in the situation that demand a different approach, and assess changes in the climate they are creating for their team.
Managing your personal brand requires leaders to be a great role model, mentor, and / or a voice that others can depend upon.

A major part of leadership development is helping people develop how they think.

How they get to an answer matters more than ever. The focus is on the individual’s responsibility for own development. And it starts with the self-awareness and the ability to change the mindset.  When people are confronted with increased complexity and challenge that can’t be reconciled with what they know and can do at their current level, people have to take the next step. Development accelerates when people are able to identify the assumptions that are holding them at their current level of development and find a way to do something about it.

Where to start? A starting point can come from redefining what is meant by the term leadership. It is not anymore the heroic leader with the 5, 7, 10 traits that makes them successful. Leadership is a process of mobilizing people to face difficult challenges, process of inspiring teams to high performance; process of leading in a complex world and above all to create a leadership brand. Who is the leader becomes less important than what is needed in the system and how we can produce it.

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