World Youth Skills Day
Young people make the difference in a sustainable and inclusive future
The United Nations introduced World Youth Skills Day in 2015 to raise awareness of the importance of acquiring all kinds of cross-cutting skills for the future, which are increasingly in demand in the workplace.
The aim of this year’s Day is to focus on the current situation of the world of youth, who are among the most obstructed in their approach to education and their search for job opportunities. According to the ILO, International Labour Organization, today about 400 million young people worldwide cannot access a job that guarantees continuity and therefore a future for them.
In a world where many young people today enjoy seemingly unlimited opportunities and millions more do not, the younger generation is still almost three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. They are continually exposed to precarious and low quality jobs, to greater inequalities in the labour market, where their transition from school is increasingly long and insecure.
ATTENTION! SKILLS ARE NOT ENOUGH
The needs proposed by the UN require responses that are not just technical and material. The most important part of the human being, the only one capable of guaranteeing him a real growth, is his emotional world.
Helping human beings to bring out their emotional world, as a compass to help them navigate the working world, is the necessary basis before any form of education and training.
If we lose sight of emotional growth and focus only on technical skills, we risk failing to understand the needs of young people and giving the wrong or at least partial answers to the right questions.