Youth unemployment rates above 10% in most European countries and over 20% in 10 member states.

The objective is not just to provide employment, but to help young people find jobs that correspond to their skills and aspirations, with decent pay and working conditions, and professional and personal growth perspectives.

Different policies can contribute to this:

• Training and education to match skills with job demand
• Apprenticeships offering paid work experience and employer connections
• Entrepreneurship support to help youth create businesses
• Mobility schemes to gain experience in other parts of Europe

The webinar will explore various strategies to help young people define career goals, secure their first job, experience different work environments, understand professional norms, and explore entrepreneurship.

Part of the challenge is to engage with youth meaningfully.

This presupposes that existing obstacles to labour market integration of different categories of youth are identified.

It may be necessary to consider ways to make professions facing recruitment challenges more appealing to young people.

Furthermore, communication methods and tools must be adapted to target groups.

What you can expect

• Keynote speech by Gustavs M.

  Upmanis on how to enhance labour market integration based on experience from Latvia and other European countries, RuralYouthFuture

Gustavs will present reflections on how to jointly mobilise youth, youth organisations and companies in efforts to enhance labour market integration.

He will share lessons learnt from designing and operating an online skills acquisition and job finding platform that targets young people.

 His insights on the potentials and limitations of digital approaches to youth labour market integration are based on experience from initiatives in multiple European countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus and Latvia).

• Presentation by Simona Knavs on the Vocational Maturity Self-Assessment tool by Youth in Transition Erasmus+ project, atWork4NEETS project 

The Vocational Maturity Self-Assessment Tool helps identify personal and vocational competencies in a dialogue between a young person and a professional.

It shows that a wide range of professionals support young people.

Some of them, teachers, are not experts in labour market integration and vocational support.

The tool helps them structure exchanges and synthesise outcomes.

It focuses on six key areas: motivation, goal setting, flexibility, resilience, social skills, and professional ;This tool has been adopted in multiple European ;

• Presentation by Tjaša Perković on the AGRO FI Young – Microcredits in agriculture for young people, Microfuture project (TBC)

Microcredit has become an increasingly prominent tool in aiding people to embark on professional projects.

By providing small-scale loans with accessible terms, it enables aspiring entrepreneurs to overcome initial financial hurdles that might otherwise hinder their ambitions.

The case of microcredit for young farmers exemplifies how such schemes can be tailored to meet the needs and aspirations of young entrepreneurs.