Max Kirby, who says there’s never been a better time to be young, has won £10,000 for penning his thoughts on ways to reduce unemployment. Here is his winning essay.
One in five young adults in Britain is unemployed, more than twice the rate for the workforce as a whole. And (temporarily, I hope) I am one of them. Yet I am convinced there has never been a better time to be young. The world is bursting with opportunity; every day, new inventions answer questions we had never thought to ask.
It’s time to tackle youth unemployment in that spirit; as Einstein said, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Generation Y should stop asking “why me?” and start asking “why not?”
First, we must adopt the right mindset: positive in outlook and global in ambition. For optimism stems, not from denying change, but from recognizing the possibilities it presents. The job-for-life has gone – but so has the tedium of career monogamy. International competition has intensified – but also opened up new opportunities abroad.
Woolworths, Borders and Comet won’t be hiring again – but if Amazon brought them down, simultaneously it is enabling sole traders and aspiring authors to reach a wider audience than ever before.
So let’s forget misplaced nostalgia and address the heart of the problem. Youth unemployment has been rising for a decade; the financial crisis can’t take all the blame, but it can teach us to challenge easy assumptions.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via The winning essay: How to solve youth unemployment – Telegraph.
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Thank you, this was interesting!
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Posted by literarylydi | February 8, 2013, 2:31 pm