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Business Daily: Jobs for the young

Jobs for the young

16/12/2011

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Jobs for the young

Why is youth unemployment so high and what can be done about it?

Young people are now three times more likely to be out of work than older workers and effects can scar a persons' prospects for life: what can be done?

Why is youth unemployment so high and what can be done about it?  All this week Business Daily has been exploring the global problem of rising youth unemployment.  

Indonesia is a case in point.  It has the fourth largest population of young people in the world but stable jobs are hard to find so many young Indonesians scratch a living doing odd jobs. 

Our Indonesia correspondent Karishma Vaswani travelled to the city of Makassar in South Sulawesi, one of the parts of Indonesia with extremely high youth unemployment rates, to find out how young Indonesians are dealing with working in the informal sector.

So what can be done to create opportunities for young people?  The problem is they tend to be the first to lose their jobs when trouble hits.  They are relatively inexperienced and low-skilled and, in many countries, are easier to fire than their elders.  

But the effects of unemployment on the young can be at least as pernicious as on older workers.  Indeed, it can scar a person's prospects for a lifetime: research suggests the best indicator of future unemployment is previous unemployment.  

We've put together a panel of three world experts: Jose Manuel Salazar, the head of employment at the International Labour Organisation; Denis Pemmel of the managing director of the International Confederation of Private Employment Agencies and Ian Livingston founder and life President of Eidos, the home of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider.

But, of course, not all young people struggle to get jobs.  Indeed, there is a huge shortage of able and well trained software engineers around the world.  It means that the world's top computer companies will travel the globe trying to seek out the best young talent.  It is a version of what used to be called the brain drain except these days all sorts of countries are in the market for talent as our regular commentator James Shrodes has been discovering.

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