Vocational education and training - VET

Francis Green, Golo Henseke and Ingrid Schoon. With skill shortages widely reported, you may be wondering what’s been happening to the learning of job skills among young people during Covid. It is already obvious that, following Brexit, we in Britain cannot rely as much on the skills of migrants – and this doesn’t just mean [...]

Research teams are adapting their work during the pandemic to find solutions for youth employment.

Some half a million will be leaving university, as many more may be leaving school or ending training and further education to emerge into nothingness. If they have lost their entire summer term, they will have had precious little careers advice, most of which was an early victim of austerity cuts anyway. The wealth of research from previous recessions shows that a long spell of early unemployment risks people being scarred for life.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment rates for young Canadians increased by about 6 percentage points from 2019 to 2020, roughly twice the increase observed among older Canadians. By 2020, the unemployment rates of young men and young women aged 15 to 30 and not in school full-time stood at 15.5% and 13.7% respectively. These relatively high unemployment rates suggest that young high school and postsecondary graduates who entered the labour market in 2020 or who will do so in 2021 might see lower earnings in the years following graduation than they would have in a more dynamic labour market.

While policymakers have endorsed the role of the private sector as a job generator, it remains unclear whether, and under what conditions, the formal private sector generates enough and decent jobs. 
To what extent do formal private enterprises create decent, secure jobs for young people? What obstacles do young adults face when trying to access jobs in the formal private sector?
What additional difficulties are present in fragile and conflict-affected settings? And, how can policies ensure the formal private sector does not reproduce and entrench insecure and vulnerable employment?

On the surface, there may not appear to be a problem when it comes to the labour market participation of Canada’s youth, a population of 6.8 million people between the ages of 15 and 29. Among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, Canadian youth are more likely to be employed than their peers. At the same time, the labour landscape is being redefined at a dizzying pace.
New and emerging technologies, demographic change and globalization are profoundly changing the way work gets done, and what the jobs of the future will require of our youngest workers.