The World Youth Skills Day

There are over 1.2 billion young people between the ages of 15 and 24 in the world, around 16% of the world’s population. It is said that young people are the future, but for some of them, the future may not be among the best. One of the most worrying economic and social problems is youth unemployment. In Italy, about 30% of young people are currently unemployed, in Europe this value is around 15%, in the world, according to the World Bank, around 13%. These are worrying figures, especially considering the period of rapid changes and the need for new forms of work. Keeping up with technology, training and the acquisition of new skills – together with the reinforcement of previous ones – are a key tool for entering the world of work.

The World Youth Skills Day. The possibility that a young person can’t find a job are three times greater than an adult with the same training; the jobs that the kids find are also often underpaid, low quality, without guarantees and, at times, with high risks. The situation gets worse if we consider the girls, who are more likely to find jobs that are part-time and with temporary contracts. One of the reasons behind youth unemployment is structural unemployment, or that discrepancy between the skills that workers can offer and the skills required by employers. Allowing young people, therefore, to develop those skills required by the labor market is the main tool for defeating youth unemployment. In this context, the World Youth Skills Day, promoted by UNESCO, is born. Established in December 2014, the day has the objective of allowing the achievement of better socio-economic conditions for today’s youth by providing everyone with the possibility of redemption provided by education.

The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. Skills development is a primary tool to enable young people to make a gradual transition to work. The skills and jobs for young people are at the forefront of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. It is a document born within the framework of the United Nations with the aim of solving a wide range of problems concerning economic, social, environmental, and not only, development. This is a clear judgment on the unsustainability of the current development model. One of the key points of the agenda is education as a means of improving the living conditions of people – especially young people.

The importance of education. The first objective to be achieved concerning education according to the 2030 agenda is to guarantee a completely free, equal and of quality primary and secondary education for all the children of the world. But education must not and cannot stop at this, which has to be only a starting point. Specializations and, above all, Lifelong Learning, or the process of continuous and constant training over time. The continuous acquisition of new skills is fundamental to keep up with the exponential speed of our societies’ changes under the pressure of new scientific and technological discoveries. In this field, Impactscool moves to bring education into those emerging areas, namely technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and many others, so as to provide young people – and not only – a chance to reach the best of future possible.