Paul Comyn, ILO Senior Vocational Skills and Development Specialist and Drew Gardiner, Youth Employment Specialist

This week, as we prepare ILO’s participation in the World Skills Competition 2017, taking place in Abu Dhabi, UAE from 15-18 October, we are left to reflect on a major theme which is troubling governments, employers, workers and young people across the globe – the so called skills mismatch.

This year’s World Skills Competition features 1,300 competitors, 100,000 visitors and 51 skills. The competition will cover a diverse range of vocational categories including mechatronics, information network cabling, floor tiling, patisserie, and plumbing just to name a few.

The ILO, as a conference coalition partner, will be involved in two major activities of the Competition, the WorldSkills Conference and the WorldSkills Youth Forum which comes under the theme “Skills strategies for a globalized world”.

Refocusing the debate on jobs and skills mismatch

The ILO’s SKILLS branch will lead a conference session on the topic of skills mismatch that will consider not only what causes skills mismatch, but also to better understand the different types of skills mismatches, the labour market impact they have and their relative importance.

Some 1,300 competitors will meet in Abu Dhabi for the World Skills Competition from 15-18 October. Copyright: WorldSkills International

High and persistent levels of youth unemployment, together with job vacancies that remain unfilled, are often attributed to mismatches between jobs and skills. The debate frequently focusses on why employers are unable to fill the vacancies they have. But this is only one form of skills mismatch. The problems faced by employers are technically known as skills gaps or skills shortages (which are a form of skills mismatch), but how important are they compared with other forms of skills mismatch like over-education?

The point here is not to underestimate the importance of skills shortages, as nearly 50 per cent of all European firms report difficulties in recruiting higher education graduates (Eurobaromater survey, 2010), but the evidence that these shortages are to do with skills rather than employment opportunities and conditions is actually weak, and whether they have any effect on the performance or income of these firms is also not clearly understood.

Future education aims to be transformative, building the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that a citizen needs to be able to contribute to a more inclusive, just and peaceful world.” — Nesrine Saouli, WorldSkills Youth Forum Delegate from Algeria

One area that has received relatively little attention is the issue of over-education, which occurs when an individual possesses a level of education in excess of that which is required for their job.  After an extensive review of existing research, Prof. Séamus McGuiness of ESRI  established that a sizeable fraction of workers are in occupations that do not require as much schooling as they have acquired. Think, for example, about that taxi driver you encountered that holds a PhD, an example that points to a mismatch between jobs and skills.

The relative importance of too much vs a shortage of education or skills has important policy implications. In reviewing national skills policies that aim to address skills mismatch, the same review of research found that the majority of policy responses typically seek to address either skill shortages or skill gaps rather than the issue for which the best data exists, over-education. This challenge is further exacerbated by demand side gaps and the limited creation of appropriate employment opportunities.

“It is vital for a person to develop an entrepreneurial mindset so that one can push boundaries and take risks without holding back. It gives one and those around him/her, an opportunity to grow mentally.” — Buhle Success Makama, WorldSkills Youth Forum Delegate from South Africa

If there is a lack of comprehensive policies on employment and skills then there is a greater chance that productivity and economic growth will suffer. A balance needs to be struck between polices that simulate job creation through pro-employment economic policies, reducing skill shortages and skill gaps and removing constraints associated with surpluses in education and skills. A more integrated approach is needed.

What do young people think about jobs and skills mismatches?

The ILO’s Youth Employment Programme Unit has the unique opportunity to serve as a mentor for the World Skills Youth Forum, a parallel event to the World Skills Competition which brings together 300 young people to participate in a series of thematic think tanks. Some of the topics being discussed include “The Role of Skills in Building Tomorrow’s Cities and Villages”, “How can Youth be both Job Ready and Adaptable?” and “How can Skills be the Driving Force of Innovation?”

The Youth Forum provided a chance for us to hear from young people directly, through moderation of online forums and direct interviews with young people, on how they view the issue of skills mismatch.

“I believe that technology is giving us a spur to create new jobs that never existed before. It’s true that technology is taking over some jobs but why can’t we say that technology is ‘transforming jobs’ rather than replacing them”. — Alia Alkaabi, WorldSkills Youth Forum Delegate from U.A.E.

The importance of technology emerged as the major contributor to skills development and jobs for young people in the future. The Forum participants spoke about technology as the key to the modern economy, as well as the digitization of skills, jobs and future opportunities. They also cited collaboration, multi-tasking, problem solving and creative thinking as the key soft skills to reduce skills mismatch.

The youth delegates gave examples of policies and programmes that are contributing to reducing jobs and skills mismatches around the world. These included Taiwan, which is developing a TVET system geared towards the 10 skills needed in the workplace by 2020: cognitive flexibility, negotiation, service orientation, judgment and decision making, emotional intelligence, coordinating with others, people management, creativity, critical thinking, complex problem solving. They also mentioned the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority in Dubai which will launch robots that will transport documents and items to clients through drones. This may eventually reduce the number of staff at a company but will open up other employment opportunities for youth such as the management and maintenance of this new automated service.

What comes next?

ILO’s participation in the 2017 World Skills Conference is linked to major programme of work at the ILO, the Jobs & Skills Mismatch Global Product under development by the Employment Policy Department. The global product has been created because the governments and employers’ and workers’ organizations that make up the ILO, have expressed interest in the topic of skills mismatch and we are keen to ensure that the issues and challenges associated with measuring and interpreting skills mismatch are more widely and clearly understood. Readers are invited to engage with us through our Skills for Employment Knowledge Sharing Platform and the What Works in Youth Employment Platform.

Sara Elder, CTA Work4Youth Project, Youth Employment Unit

If you’re as baffled as I am by the speed at which the acronym NEETs has become standard jargon in the media, academia and international organisations, please take a moment to join me for a brief examination of what NEETs actually means. Read the technical brief

Who are NEETs? Strictly speaking, NEETs are young people who are “Neither in Employment nor in Education or Training”. Why is everybody talking about them? Perhaps because the idea of NEETs is vague enough to allow for all-encompassing interpretations of the challenges facing young people. NEETs has become shorthand for exclusion, marginalization, joblessness and discouragement. It’s even been given as evidence for a “jobless generation”, which—let’s face it—makes a great headline.

“What does NEETs mean and why is the concept so easily misinterpreted?” Read the technical brief.

I don’t deny that the outlook for youth employment is dire in several parts of the world. My purpose here is to shed some light on the ambiguities surrounding the term in the hopes of avoiding future confusion.

Here are some of the issues that have turned up in my research:

1. The ambiguity of NEETs arises from the two variables it melds together: young people who aren’t in work and young people who aren’t in school or training. The trouble is that once you unravel them, they tell you different things about different people. For example, if you want to talk about NEETs among young women, you find what you’re really talking about in many countries is female inactivity and lack of access to education. NEET rates for men, on the other hand, tend to be much lower and boil down to unemployment, a separate issue entirely. You would have arrived at the same conclusion, and avoided misinterpreting the data, by honing in on two specific indicators—inactive non-students and the classic unemployment rate (even with all its faults). So why lump these variables together in NEETs if they have to be disaggregated to be interpreted correctly?

2. Equating NEETs with youth discouragement is especially misguided. When we measured the number of discouraged youth as a share of total NEETs in 37 countries, we found that the average share of discouraged youth in the total number of NEETs was only 9 per cent.

3. The average NEET rate of young people between the ages of 15-29 in high-income countries comes to 15.5 per cent. The rate in low-income countries isn’t far off at 18.1 per cent. Middle-income countries, meanwhile, have NEET rates between 25.2-26.8 per cent. Are we to assume, then, that it is middle-income countries that have the greatest difficulty keeping youth engaged? Or that youth exclusion isn’t an issue in sub-Saharan Africa? Or is the problem, rather, that attention is perhaps being focused on the wrong indicator to capture youth employment challenges in low-income countries?

4. Finally, despite statements made to the contrary, the NEET rate is NOT easy to measure. To calculate it, one needs to cross-tabulate the education status of youth by economic activity from the same survey. This means that, unless the national statistics offices include the NEET rate in their reports—bearing in mind the sporadic nature of surveys and reports in low-income countries—or makes the raw datasets available, policymakers and the public at large won’t have access to the information outside of countries with the most advanced statistical capacity.

Any indicator put forth to raise awareness of the urgency of finding solutions for youth employment ought to be a step in the right direction. But getting to the bottom of the NEETs definition and applicability is especially important as we start to hear more about it, including in the discussion on the post-2015 development agenda.

Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labour Organization

Could a robot replace your job? Fears about technology’s impact on the labour market are nothing new. Way back before the International Labour Organization (ILO) came into being in 1919, the Luddites were one group of early-19th century English workers who destroyed the labour-saving textile machines which were replacing their jobs.

The anxiety that machines could kill millions of jobs in our globalized workplaces is real – and it comes at a time when the world economy is already facing a major employment crisis. The jobs gap in G20 countries stands at about 54 million and could expand to over 60 million by 2018 unless current growth trends improve.

Technology has reduced the labour required for mass production and is further hollowing out the job market by automating even routine legal and accounting tasks. Robotics is making a major breakthrough in manufacturing, with 200,000 industrial robots coming into use each year and a total of 1.5 million expected by this year (2015).

Digital technology, human workplace

Image: Robot arms work on a Porsche Macan’s body at the new plant in the eastern German city of Leipzig February 5, 2014. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

For developed and developing nations alike, it is clear that as globalization gathers pace, adding more supply chains operating in more complex regulatory environments with blurred geographic boundaries, no country can ignore the digital world without getting left out of the world economy.

So how can we keep the human dimension — in a world of work run more and more by robots? How can we best adapt the labour market and create decent jobs?

Fundamentally and critically, we need to anticipate upcoming technological changes and tackle the education and skills mismatch in labour markets. Globally, one third of employers surveyed complain of not being able to find the right skill sets to fill existing vacancies.

We must build solid bridges between the world of work and training providers, so that skills can be matched to market needs. This is not only a matter for public policy. Employers and trade unions must take more responsibility for investing in skills by sitting at the table with trainers and policy makers. Their talks must be informed by labour market information, employment services and performance reviews.

Adequate education and skills for countries at all development levels increases their ability to innovate and adopt new technologies. It means the difference between inclusive growth and growth that leaves large segments of society behind. A workforce that has been appropriately trained and is able to continue learning boosts investor confidence and thus job growth.

The employee-employer relationship has changed

Changes are inherent in the very nature of the relationship we have with an employer. Workers entering the job market are increasingly offered short-term or temporary contracts and are often forced to take informal work or emigrate for a job. This is exacerbating trends towards income inequalities.

Beyond training for workers in the digital era, sustainable economies require protections for workers in good times and bad. Along with adequate unemployment benefit systems, social protections such as healthcare and pensions form a basis for overall worker security and a healthy economy. Yet only 20% of the world’s population today has adequate social security coverage and more than half lack any coverage at all.

It has been proven that social protection can work as a buffer to mitigate the effects of economic crises. The ILO also advocates minimum levels of social protection as spelled out in its Recommendation 202 concerning national floors of social protection.

Post-digital values?

Established “pre-digital world” values, which are encoded in ILO labour standards, still apply in our post-digital era. In fact, they become even more relevant if the traditional employee-employer relationship becomes increasingly eroded in the future.

The evolving complexities of the world of work will require complex solutions. This is why last year I launched the ILO’s “world of work” initiative to try and provide a factual understanding for defining the trends ahead and discussing what needs to be done to establish the post-digital world we all want.

Our world has changed vastly over the past century and not only because of technology. By 2050, the global population will surpass 9 billion. The number of people aged 60 years and over will have tripled. Three-quarters of older persons will be living in what are now developing countries and the majority will be women.

Human brain, human brawn

This new demographic context has profound implications for labour markets, social security systems, employment and economic development.

For all the strides we’ve made since the Luddite era, we arrive back at the simple truth that the machines were and continue to be built by human brain and brawn. Now and going forward, the digital economy must be a sustainable one and it must be built on decent work which gives humans dignity. It is work which is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for men and women and their families.

Guy Ryder is attending the Annual Meeting 2015 in Davos, and is a panel member in the session Employment: Mind the Gap on 23/1 at 12.30 CET.

This article was originally published on the World Economic Forum website

Michael Axmann, Senior Expert in Skills Development Systems at ILO

“You will get the right skills with an apprenticeship!”

Those were my mother’s words when, at the age of 18, I came home with a two-year contract in my pocket for an apprenticeship at a local bank. I’d decided not to go to college right away, because I wanted to get some work experience and start earning some money. Even though I eventually did get my university degree, I still look back on that decision as one of the best career moves I ever made.

Young people weighing their career options ought to consider making the same choice. ILO estimates put the number of unemployed young people at over 74.5 million worldwide. Many of them are college graduates who cannot find work even despite their years of study.

“Promoting quality apprenticeships is a top priority for the ILO, since they move youth into decent jobs and help enterprises to find the workforce they need for the future,” ILO Director- General Guy Ryder said at a high-level meeting on professional training in Winterthur, Switzerland. Learn more

If you’re a young person trying to pick a career path, here are five reasons why an apprenticeship might be right for you:

1. You will learn valuable job skills
There’s no substitute for learning on the job and that’s what you do with an apprenticeship. A good programme should provide workplace training together with other skills like language-learning, computer literacy, entrepreneurship and technical math. That will involve some classroom hours, but you’ll still spend most of your time at the workplace, “learning by doing.” All of the skills you’ll take away will help you get a job in your field, whether you’re a car mechanic, IT specialist, bank clerk, hairdresser, electrician, mason, etc.

2. You will earn a salary
As an apprentice, you will sign an employment contract for a specific time with an employer, which can be up to four years depending on the kind of programme. Your salary will usually go up from one year to the next as you learn new and more valuable skills. So, rather than paying tuition to learn future job skills, you will earn while you learn.

3. You will gain independence
You may think of an apprenticeship as getting your hands dirty at the expense of a traditional education, but consider this: in countries like Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands, apprenticeship programmes are quite prestigious. It’s easy to see why: apprentices gain their independence earlier than their peers while learning skills that help them keep it.

4. You will jump-start your career
How many job applications have you completed and how frustrating was it when you were rejected? How many internships have you done and how many times were you not paid for your hard work? Apprentices, by contrast, start their careers when they’re as young as 17 years old. University graduates hunting for jobs in their twenties will envy the paid work experience and retirement benefits that you will have accumulated in the meantime.

“Rather than paying tuition to learn future job skills, you will earn while you learn.”

5. You will open doors
Whatever you decide to do in life, an apprenticeship will open the door to the world of work. You can stick with what you’ve learnt and pursue a future in carpentry, IT services or some other technical field. Or you can go to university and top up your work skills with an advanced degree in architecture, software engineering or city planning. Either way, you won’t regret those valuable job skills, which will serve you for the rest of your life.

Still not convinced? Hear from Benjamin Poredo, a former apprentice from Austria, who went on to become an engineer.

Laura Brewer, ILO Specialist in Skills for Youth Employment  

After four years of college, my son is about to graduate with a degree in Environmental Politics. We are both aware that he is entering the job market at a time when more and more young people cannot find work.

While putting together his résumé, he recently asked me what kind of skills today’s employers want from a new job candidate. A lot of people his age are probably asking the same question, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

According to recent surveys, employers these days aren’t just looking for experience. They’re also interested in “softer skills” like problem-solving and creativity that can play as big a role in career advancement as training or education.

The good news is that even young people with no job experience at all will possess at least some of these skills, and that’s what they should focus on when writing their résumés. If that’s your situation, here’s a list of six that you can focus on:

1. Flexibility/Adaptability:  Chances are, your job will change substantially over the course of your career, even if you stay in the same field. Employers want people who can adapt to change quickly, juggle multiple tasks and work with a variety of people. You can show this on your résumé by noting any skills or languages that you’ve had to learn, time that you’ve spent abroad or situations when you’ve had to manage a variety of different commitments.

2. Effective communications skills: Whether you’re writing an e
mail or delivering a presentation, good communication skills are crucial to most careers. Employers want people who can listen and observe to gain understanding, relate their ideas effectively, and devise strategies for working together.Writing a clear and concise résumé is your first opportunity to show this. Remember to include any public-speaking experience or writing projects you did during school.

3. Problem solving: In order to succeed in the workplace (and life in general) you need to be able to evaluate situations, break them down, consider ways of resolving them and decide which is the most appropriate. This includes recognizing long-term consequences and taking personal responsibility for them. Quantifiable results can help you demonstrate this. One example would be if you’d turned around the finances of a struggling student organisation or saved time or money by making a process more efficient.

4. Creativity:  How many times have you heard that you must be innovative, intuitive, or imaginative? Employers want recruits with fresh ideas that will help to expand their businesses. Here’s another skill that you can convey with a real-world example of a time you found a new way to approach something that other people hadn’t thought of.

5. Interpersonal skills: You probably already knew that employers want people who are dedicated, hard-working and reliable. Your job is to convince them that you’ve got what it takes. Consider the job you are applying for and which interpersonal skills you think will be valued most by the employer. List each one in order of importance.

6. Teamwork: Teamwork is all about being able to operate smoothly and efficiently within a group. That requires leadership and decision-making skills, as well as the ability to follow instructions and play your role in a group. Team sports are a great way to show this on your résumé. Volunteer work or group projects at school are other good examples.

So, what’s the best way to highlight these universally sought-after skills if you don’t have any job experience? A functional résumé is a good place to start.

Unlike a traditional résumé, a functional résumé emphasizes skills over experience. Instead of listing all the places you’ve worked, it demonstrates the skills that you have to offer an employer.

Here’s one example from a high-school graduate without any previous work experience. If you’re in a similar situation, it can give you an idea of how your functional résumé might look.