It is not easy to be young in the labour market today and skills mismatch is not helping them says ILO

‘It is not easy to be young in the labour market today‘ writes the International Labour Organization (ILO) in its report GLOBAL EMPLOYMENT TRENDS FOR YOUTH 2013 A generation at risk*.

The weakening of the global recovery in 2012 and 2013 has further aggravated the youth jobs crisis and the queues for available jobs have become longer and longer for some unfortunate young jobseekers. So long, in fact, that many youth are giving up on the job search. The prolonged jobs crisis also forces the current generation of youth to be less selective about the type of job they are prepared to accept, a tendency that was already evident before the crisis. Increasing numbers of youth are now turning to available part‐time jobs or find themselves stuck in temporary employment. Secure jobs, which were once the norm for previous generations – at least in the advanced economies – have become less easily accessible for today’s youth.

The global youth unemployment rate, estimated at 12.6 per cent in 2013, is close to its crisis peak. 73 million young people are estimated to be unemployed in 2013.1 At the same time, informal employment among young people remains pervasive and transitions to decent work are slow and difficult.

The economic and social costs of unemployment, long‐term unemployment, discouragement and widespread low‐quality jobs for young people continue to rise and undermine economies’ growth potential.

Skills mismatch is adding to the youth employment crisis.

Skills mismatch on youth labour markets has become a persistent and growing trend. Overeducation and over‐skilling coexist with undereducation and under‐skilling, and increasingly with skills obsolescence brought about by long‐term unemployment.

Such a mismatch makes solutions to the youth employment crisis more difficult to find and more time consuming to implement. Moreover, to the extent that young people in employment are actually overqualified for the job they are doing, society is losing their valuable skills and forfeiting stronger productivity growth that would have been achieved had these young people been employed at their appropriate level of qualification.

In developing regions where 90 per cent of the global youth population lives, stable, quality employment is especially lacking.

Developing regions face major challenges regarding the quality of available work for young people. This report confirms that in developing economies where labour market institutions, including social protection, are weak, large numbers of young people continue to face a future of irregular employment and informality. Young workers often receive below average wages and are engaged in work for which they are either overqualified or underqualified. As much as two‐thirds of the young population is