World Youth Skills Day 2023, July 15th.

FORUM: "Empowering youth for a sustainable future:Building skills for tomorrow.'' World Youth skills Day 2023.

According to a recent ILO study, young people in the labour force are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed, with the global youth unemployment rate at about 14% in 2022. This translates into 69 million young people who were looking for a job but unable to find one. On World Youth Skills Day 2023, UNESCO-UNEVOC and WorldSkills International are joining forces to showcase the positive impact of youth skills development on societies and economies, and to empower youth to meet the challenges of an evolving global landscape through TVET. Follow the conversation with the hashtags: #15July, #WYSD, #WorldYouthSkillsDay.

EVENTS: The 2023 World Youth Skills Day hybrid event will celebrate the role of skilled young people inbuilding a sustainable future for all. 

• The first panel will include a youth focus group and a discussion on how teaching and learning processes can be optimized to prepare young people for a changing labour market. 
• The second panel will reflect on UNESCO’s Global Skills Academy and its work to scale up youth skills development as well as what more can be done to build employability, entrepreneurship, and resilience among young people. By raising awareness, fostering collaboration, and empowering young people, this observance contributes to building a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future.

 The UNESCO-UNEVOC, WorldSkills International, and partners such as WorldSkills Germany, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH remain committed to supporting youth in realizing their full potential and becoming active agents of change in their communities. 

Format The event will take place in English in a hybrid format, with participants joining in person in Bonn and online via Zoom webinar. Register here:

HOW TO GET INVOLVED!

1. Raise awareness: World Youth Skills Day seeks to raise global awareness about the importance of equipping young individuals with skills that are essential for personal development, employment, and entrepreneurship. 

2. Foster dialogue and collaboration: The observance provides a platform to engage in dialogue, exchange best practices, and foster collaboration. By bringing together diverse stakeholders, the event aims to create synergies and partnerships to address the skills gap. 

3. Promote youth employment and entrepreneurship: World Youth Skills Day endeavours to promote youth employment by emphasizing the critical role of skills in facilitating access to decent work opportunities. Furthermore, it seeks to encourage youth entrepreneurship as a means of unleashing innovation, economic growth, and sustainable development.

 4. Empower marginalized youth: The observance prioritizes empowering marginalized and disadvantaged youth. It seeks to ensure that they have access to quality education and vocational training, bridging the gap between formal and informal sectors, and creating pathways for their active participation in the economy.

INITIATIVES: Three years ago, UNESCO launched the Global Skills Academy (GSA) to provide one-stop access to training that can help young people develop skills for employment. Under the GSA initiative, UNESCO-UNEVOC leverages its partnerships with more than 220 UNEVOC Centres in over 140 countries to match learners with training offered by members of the Global Education Coalition. The selected trainings aim to help 10 million young people build skills for employability and resilience by 2029. WorldSkills is the global hub of skills excellence, working in 85 Member countries and regions to promote the benefits of vocational education and training for young people. Every two years, WorldSkills hosts the WorldSkills Competition and Conference, a global celebration of skills, showcasing how equitable access to skills changes the futures of individuals, communities, and countries. 

PUBLICATIONS: World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2023, ILO.

With regard to policy mechanisms through which policies could become effective, the ILO is proposing a “productivity ecosystems for decent work” framework to address existing barriers to productivity growth. Enterprises and their workers are embedded in an “ecosystem” in which the drivers of productivity growth and decent work are interlinked across several levels. Policies need to target specific industry and occupational needs to help businesses and employees to acquire the necessary competences to enable a successful technological transformation. Businesses not only lack necessary skills among their employees; they also often lack the requisite managerial experience, which can be acquired, for instance, through more intensive interaction with competitors in similar or related sectors. Low managerial turnover thus hampers the adoption of more productive management practices. Moreover, faster productivity growth requires that micro and small enterprises be helped to transition to formality and to achieve and maintain a minimum efficient scale and economic viability. A recent story from Colombia illustrates very well how social dialogue and collective bargaining have greatly improved productivity. Social dialogue is crucial for buttressing efforts to improve productivity. This pillar is central to addressing the large productivity differences among individuals and firms as well as the widening gap between productivity growth and wage growth, which disproportionately hurt workers. There is also evidence that bolstering the quality of industrial relations at the shop floor level helps to prevent inefficient restructuring, thereby improving firm productivity. Works councils, which have to be consulted on restructuring, investment plans or layoffs, have been shown to reduce labour turnover. When combined with industry-level bargaining that prevents rent-seeking, works councils have been shown to raise firm-level productivity and speed up the introduction of new technologies. The overall effects of trade unions and collective bargaining on productivity are ambiguous and subject to debate. Nevertheless, a stronger voice of organized labour at the company level could help to achieve faster and more equitable introduction of new technologies, which in turn could improve the longer-term prospects for productivity and employment, for instance by strengthening incentives for worker training and supporting workforce reorganization. Special attention should also be given to the role played by policies aiming to reduce the incidence of informal employment.

 

Background:  In 2014, the United Nations General Assembly declared 15 July as World Youth Skills Day, to celebrate the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship. Since then, World Youth Skills Day events have provided a unique opportunity for dialogue between young people, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, the private sector, policy-makers and development partners. As the world undergoes rapid technological, economic and societal transformations, young people will need the right skills to successfully navigate these challenges and achieve their full potential.