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‘Training & employment’ is a quarterly English-language newsletter aimed at informing the international community about research and other activities undertaken by the Centre for Research on Education, Training and Employment (CEREQ) in France. This article looks at the issue of high unemployment among young people, particularly those entering the labour market who spend long periods on the fringes. It is based on the ‘Generation 98’ survey: 54,000 youths with various educational and vocational training backgrounds out of 740,000 who left initial educational institutions in 1998 were interviewed in 2001 and 22,000 of these were interviewed again in 2003 to trace the paths they had taken during the first five years in the labour market. The article concludes that it may be inappropriate to design youth employment policies specifically for youths with no qualifications since a third of the chronically unemployed youths had reached at least baccalaureate level. It also suggests that greater awareness of the fact that there are twice as many females as males among the chronically unemployed young people might be an important step towards designing more appropriately targeted policies. Show less

This article provides information on the labour market participation of Canadians 25 to 64 years of age with a physical or mental disability related to seeing, hearing, mobility, flexibility, dexterity, pain, learning, development, psychological/mental disorders or memory. The factors associated with the employment participation of persons with disabilities are discussed, along with their job characteristics. In 2011, the employment rate of Canadians aged 25 to 64 with disabilities was 49 per cent, compared with 79 per cent for Canadians without a disability. The employment rate among persons aged 25 to 64 with a mild disability was 68 per cent, compared with 54 per cent of those with a moderate disability, 42 per cent of persons with a severe disability and 26 per cent among those with a very severe disability. The difference in employment rates between persons with disabilities and those without a disability was lower among university graduates. This difference was non-significant in the case of university graduates who had a mild or moderate disability. Approximately one in two university graduates, with or without a disability, held a professional occupation. However, graduates with a disability were less likely to hold a management position and earned less than those without a disability, especially among men. Among Canadians with a disability, 12 per cent reported having been refused a job in the previous five years as a result of their condition. The percentage was 33 per cent among 25- to 34-year-olds with a severe or very severe disability.

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In the context of the expansion of upper secondary education, young people without an upper secondary education might be considered an at-risk group in the labour market. The present investigation is a longitudinal study of career both in school and at work for young people without upper secondary education. The study is part of a nationwide school research project, in which a national sample of pupils (9000) has been followed from the age of 13 through their school careers. Employment data were collected via a questionnaire given to young people without upper secondary education in 1991 when they were 23-24 years old. The results show that even though 97 per cent of the age cohort applied to upper secondary school in their final year of compulsory school, about one-fifth lacked an upper secondary education at the age of 20. The dominant pattern of young people without upper secondary education was a blue-collar home background, extensive special education, low and declining school achievements, and low self-esteem. A similar pattern also characterised the comparison group with a two-year vocational education in upper secondary school. Their school achievements were, however, not quite so low as for young people without upper secondary education. Although the majority of young people without upper secondary school had great difficulties in school they never experienced real unemployment but entered the regular labour market no later than at age 20. The context of these findings is the long economic boom of the 1980s.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner.

This author presented a paper at the ECER 99 conference held in Lahti, Finland, September 22-25 1999, indexed at TD/TNC 62.584. Show less

This study aims to provide a detailed understanding of the underutilised workforce in New Zealand (NZ). The International Labour Organisation (ILO) considers workers to be underutilised if they are unemployed, time-related underemployed (referred to as underemployed hereinafter) or belong to the potential labour force. The primary data source for this report comes from the Household Labour Force Survey, specifically a period of results from between June 2016 and June 2018, which incorporated new variables and introduced information to identify the underutilised workforce in NZ, in line with ILO definitions. Some key findings from the study include: (1) underutilised workers tend to be significantly younger and female (one third of underemployed were aged 15-24); (2) characteristics linked with being more likely to be underutilised included low educational attainment, ethnic minorities, and large household size; (3) underemployed workers are most likely to be community and personal service workers or labourers and most likely to be found in accommodation and food services or retail trade; (4) the primary reason provided for their underemployment was 'not enough work available' (59.5 per cent) while women were four times more likely than men to cite 'difficulty in finding suitable childcare' as their reason (4.1 per cent versus 1.1 per cent); and (5) there was some evidence to indicate that underutilisation is a short-term phenomenon, with a 50.4 per cent probability that an underemployed person will be fully utilised in the next quarter they are surveyed, and an 84.8 per cent chance after a year.

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This paper measures mismatch between job-seekers and vacancies in the US labor market. Mismatch is defined as the distance between the observed allocation of unemployed workers across sectors and the optimal allocation that solves a planner's problem. The planner's allocation rule requires (productive and matching) efficiency-weighted vacancy-unemployment ratios to be equated across sectors. More severe mismatch between vacant jobs and idle workers translates into higher unemployment by reducing the aggregate job-finding rate. In this empirical analysis, [the authors] use two sources of cross-sectional data on vacancies, [Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey] JOLTS and [HelpWanted OnLine] HWOL, together with unemployment data from the [Current Population Survey] CPS. [The authors] find that mismatch across industries and occupations accounts for 0.6 to 1.7 percentage points of the recent rise (by about five percentage points) in the US unemployment rate, whereas geographical mismatch plays no role. The share of the rise in unemployment explained by mismatch is increasing in the education level.

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Are all Japanese youth ready for the structural reforms proposed as a supply-side policy of Abenomics? To answer this question, [the authors] assess how well Japanese youth have coped with the labor market's long-term structural changes, induced primarily by deepening interdependence with emerging economies and rapid technological progress over the last three decades. [The authors] examine the role of educational upgrading on the labor-market outcomes of youth between the ages of 25 and 29, using six waves of micro data from the Employment Status Survey spanning from 1982 to 2007. The analysis demonstrates that the demand growth for skilled labor relative to unskilled labor has been met by the educational upgrading of youth through the expansion of tertiary education, including education in vocational schools. Youth left behind the trend of educational upgrading, however, have suffered significantly from decreasing employment opportunities and deteriorating working conditions.

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Preparations are being made for the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI): ‘Living and learning for a viable future - the power of adult learning’, to be held in Brazil in 2009. As part of these preparations, member states are requested to prepare a national report on the developments in adult learning and education since 1997 (CONFINTEA V), on the current state of the art and future challenges of adult learning and education. These reports will constitute a major input for the Brazil conference, help to prepare a regional synthesis for the regional preparatory conferences and supply critical data for a Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE).

In the Slovak Republic, the period from 2003 to 2005 saw the enhancement of the educational level of working people. However, the Slovak Republic faces the following challenges in the field of education: how to ensure a supply of suitably educated, trained and qualified workers to answer the needs of the labour market now and in the future; and how to successfully face the ageing of the population. As well, despite the positive indicators in the improvement in the overall unemployment rate in the Slovak Republic, the continuing problem of finding employment for persons from marginalised groups endures. The share of unemployed persons with low qualifications is growing and these persons constitute the core of the permanently long-term unemployed. Adult learning and education (ALE) has a role to play in facing these challenges. ALE in both the formal and non-formal sectors of education is implemented as an organised activity targeted on acquiring knowledge, abilities and skills necessary for effective participation in the work and civic life of the country. ALE education in the Slovak Republic takes place in both the formal and informal sectors of education, carried out in formal educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities) as well as in community organisations, companies and workplaces. On the national level the challenges and objectives for ALE include: the training of workers for the constantly changing labour market; the increasing importance of informal education and non-formal learning and their merging with formal education; the need for greater differentiation of target groups and better targeting of education programs; increasing the motivation of employees and employers to participate in education and its provision; the dissemination of information regarding possibilities for learning and finding employment; the promotion of new forms of education built on the use of modern technologies with an emphasis on increasing learner activity/participation in this process; the application of the system approach to implementing adult education with the goal of increasing its higher quality and effectiveness; defining and improving the status of adult educators and their education, including evaluation of the quality of their activities and professional development; an emphasis on the evaluation and acknowledgement of outcomes of education including the design of national qualification criteria and their connection to the internationally acknowledged outcomes of education (transfer of credits); and increasing financial support to ALE. Show less

This is the first report in the series. This report presents the first national estimates on the labour market experiences of Aboriginal people living off-reserve from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). These estimates are based on the year 2007 and cover Aboriginal people living off-reserve in the ten provinces. This report examines the labour force characteristics of the Aboriginal people, namely the employment and unemployment rates as well as wages by Aboriginal identity. The report further looks at the estimates by non-Aboriginal as well as Aboriginal, North American Indian and Metis populations. Also included is limited analysis on the Inuit population using the 2006 Census results, since the LFS sample size was too small for this group. Data are presented for the following characteristics: age, sex, educational attainment, province or region and industry. Finally, trend analysis is provided for the four western provinces over a four year period.

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The first Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM) was released in 1999. [Its primary objectives are]: (1) to present a core set of labour market indicators; and (2) to improve the availability of the indicators to monitor new employment trends. But that is not all that the KILM has to offer. The KILM is a collection of 18 ‘key’ indicators of the labour market, touching on employment and other variables relating to employment (status, sector, hours, flows etc.), the lack of work and the characteristics of jobseekers, education, wages and compensation costs, labour productivity and working poverty. Taken together, the KILM indicators give a strong foundation from which to begin addressing key questions related to productive employment and decent work. The KILM 8th edition includes new indicators on unemployment flows as part of its series of indicators on unemployment (KILM 9). [Key findings presented in the 8th edition include:] the level of skills mismatch in developed economies is high; in developed economies, the average incidence of overqualification in 2010 was 10.1 per cent (and ranged from 3.6 to 16.8 per cent), while underqualification averaged 28.1 per cent (and ranged from 15.9 to 45.6 per cent); [and] the risk of overqualification is higher for migrants, younger workers and persons with disabilities; the incidence of overeducation tends to increase over time, in part due to increasing levels of educational attainment.

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This policy brief highlights the struggles young adults have faced in 'The Lost Decade' of 2000-2010. Steep declines in employment rates along with increasing rates of underemployment, hidden unemployment and mal-employment for young college graduates has made this past decade a 'jobless decade'. Nearly two million jobs were lost during this time period though some young workers were hit harder than others depending on age, gender, race, ethnicity and educational attainment.

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