World Youth Skills Day
The theme of World Youth Skills Day 2023 is ‘Skillful Teachers, Trainers and Youth for a Transformative Future’. It emphasises the essential role that teachers, trainers and other educators play in providing skills for young people to transition to the labour market and to actively engage in their communities and societies. But how to become actors of social transformation if for young people the entry into the labour market, at every latitude, is characterised by precariousness and denial of rights?
Traditionally organised, since December 2014, by the Permanent Missions to the UN of Portugal and Sri Lanka together with UNESCO, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Youth, the Day has aimed to draw the international community’s attention to the urgency of bridging the gap between education and the labour market. But this year we also want to emphasise the need to integrate skills of civic value: participation in social transformation for global citizenship.
Unicef states that ‘today the likelihood of being unemployed is three times higher for a young person than for an adult, and the prospect is often of entering the labour market through the back door, with temporary contracts and lower quality, underpaid and unprotected jobs. Especially if the young person is a youth.
It is estimated that 85% of the jobs that will be created globally between now and 2030 have not yet been invented, and will require knowledge and skills that are not yet being passed on to young people!” (Source: https://www.unicef.it/media/world-youth-skills-day-colmare-il-gap-tra-competenze-dei-giovani-e-mercato-del-lavoro/).
