I'm most worried not for the numbers as for the corrosive effect long periods of unemployment have on employability. You lose the simple habits which are required for lots of gainful employment, such as "getting up before 9 AM consistently" and "working mostly non-stop for 8 hours a day".<p>I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new normal for him has become that he works 15 minutes a day or less on his job search. (Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes <i>is for suckers</i>.)
The simple answer is: These kids are training for the wrong jobs. College (in many areas) is a waste. Trade schools (vo-tech) offer a (almost 100%) guarantee of employment.<p>A trade is a gateway to self employment (once you have your hours in for licensing).<p>My brother has his master electrician's license in two states. He has more work than he knows what to do with.<p>I have two friends who recently went back to school (one finishing undergrad business/marketing the other MBA). Their job outlook is _poor_. The market is flooded with people that have _soft_ skills.<p>Our company is still hiring network technicians. Again a two year degree with _hard_ skill requirements. (Cisco certs, etc).<p>Tech school is way cheaper than college and your job prospects are good.
Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more.<p>Wealth is manufactured by machines not people.<p>Some generation has to close the gap between how wealthy society is and how much average member of society has to work for same basic needs.<p>You can't make basic necessities cost always nearly same amount of work because that work thanks to technology is producing more and more wealth.<p>You can't keep prices of meals to be higher than recent technological wonder. Someone at some point will call bullshit on that. "My sandwich is not worth same amount of wealth as 4GB flash thumb drive. They just want me to pay this much for sandwich to keep me working because I need sandwich. I'll just pass on working, buy cheapest food and see how this works out. They don't seem to want me in their companies anyway."<p>This unemployed generation can be the first one to take advantage of wealth humans get from technology en masse without need to cunningly trick everyone else out of their share. They'll get their share just by being more or less human dead weight that rich won't be able to shake off because they can't kill them or even let them die because there's for the first time too many of them.
> <i>But the failure to launch has serious consequences for society—as Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's overthrown President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, discovered.</i><p>Mmm, what? Don't make it sound like overturning dictators is a bad thing, dude.<p>Maybe it's much better for "society" to have unemployed young people with not only the courage to fight for freedom but also nothing better to do with their time, than to have people with jobs who tolerate authoritarianism.
I've spoken to a few Chinese about this, where manual workers get more than uni grads (though not as much as successful business owners). Chinese really value education (in the high culture sense), and education (in the sense of meaningless test scores), money, and status. Until a few years ago, degrees were a ticket to riches. Now, they just mean you are overqualified for higher-paying jobs. Their feelings about it tend to be <i>extremely</i> complicated.
I grew up with an ex-drill sergeant for a father. My dad was a skilled carpenter, a certified electrician and welder (TIG, MIG and Stick), and has fixed every single car I've owned and totalled.<p>Passed down to myself and my brothers, we're both skilled in welding, my brother now has his own electrician shop. I work in IT. If suddenly my IT job goes away, I have a trade to fall on.<p>Skilled trades and physical labor it seems to be lost arts on my generation (I'm 25) and that depresses me.
In Mexico they are called nini's (_ni_ estudian, _ni_ trabajan). They often find "better" opportunities joining organized crime/drug cartels. This, in my opinion, is one the main challenges that need to be resolve in order to end violence in Mexico.
They mention the product lifecycle being short as a primary reason for not wanting to bring on new employees. If it takes someone 12 months to get up to speed in an 18 month product lifecycle, it is too costly.<p>I've got to wonder what kind of industry takes 12 months to get up to speed unless you've got workers coming in with absolutely no training and education. For most programmers I know, the worst case ramp up time is around 3 months. That is often with a project that will never be profitable, much less make it for 18 months.<p>There are other fiscally attractive reasons to hire young so I'd think if training was the only problem, we could solve that problem. The problem I see with regards to education in most companies is that there is simply no one on staff who can do the training effectively or is given the time to do so. Perhaps this will open the door for the return of a mini trade school in the form of an app.
I think one thing that we have in the US is that unemployment centers were set up in a different age and are designed to serve unskilled labor--but there are not so many unskilled jobs. Some of the training programs that are paid for are short "certificate" programs of dubious worth.<p>But, here's a question: currently sites like ODesk provide contract labor. Some of the jobs are for people to do research (for example, I wanted a listing of high schools/contact information for a side project I'm working on). I've only done a couple of postings, but I got very few American applicants. Is it just not well publicized? The rates are low, so it's not a good long term solution, but in some cases for "simple" research jobs, the rates could be $10/hr, which compared to some service jobs is competitive (since many service jobs here also don't provide health care)--especially in some lower cost of living states.
One key bit: "more education is not always better. What matters is matching the skills of the workforce to the skills that employers demand. In Iran, where the percentage of people aged 15 and over with postsecondary degrees has soared from 2.5 percent to 10.5 percent over the past 20 years, the education system has become 'a giant diploma mill,' says Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economist at Virginia Tech."<p>The same is true here, as many of our chronically "overqualified" unemployed could attest. What's worse, some of what counts as "training" here is a set of dubious commercial vocational schools --- cosmetology schools, and the like --- which soak up student loans, and leave the trainees with large debts that are hard to dismiss, even in bankruptcy.<p>(And these are pretty big business. One of them, Kaplan, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post corporation that has over $2 billion in revenue, accounts for just about all of the parent corporation's profits. Not without controversy by the way; reports of abusive practices from Kaplan have led to allegations of fraud: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html</a>
The Washington Post, of course, has editorialized in favor of its baby.)
It's time for youth to blaze new path to employment.<p>19 years old like me are trying to build a living on the internet by writing, programming, and selling ads. It's a lot of hard work to find clients and more scary when you're trying to deliver the work.
The fact is than even the educated kids are unemployable. We constantly try to hire graduate developers here in London but the fact is that most of those kids are simply unemployable. They have impressive degrees from the best universities, but I simply can't hire someone who can't code a simple Fibonacci algorithm at the whiteboard in the interview room. In the language of their choice. I'd even accept an only marginally working solution with a few bugs. Still, most of them just can't do it. They don't even know how to start.<p>Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. After 3-5 years of higher education, many of the graduates can't solve even the most basic programming problems. I suspect that this must be the case in other professions as well. Something has to be done about the completely defective higher education systems.
<i>Luckily the soil is fertile: All over the world, the hittistes and shabab atileen, NEETs and freeters and boomerang kids are hungry for a chance to thrive.</i><p>Hmm, but how hungry? Compared to say people who came of age in the 40s or 50s? I'm not sure hungry is the right word. Restless maybe. Peckish.
The government should create jobs to solve this problem. Unemployment is cruel and inefficient. Prioritizing reducing the national debt over employment is short sighted.
Anther problem is the education that people choose. The world is full of "VCR repairmen", while everyone is using disposable bluray players.<p>I see it again and again, students pick silly, simple or just useless degrees, such as<p><pre><code> * philosophy
* international relations (every single one of those wants to work for the UN, maybe 0.001% ends up there).
* arts, all kinds
* history (how many historians do we really need)
</code></pre>
Don't get me wrong, they are interesting and entertaining, but just not very helpful when it comes to being employable.
I'm sure many people who are unemployed are unemployed through no fault of their own. But...<p>... the other day I checked out a site for finding tech/design-oriented interns. There were 50 listed in my city (Philadelphia)... and most of the eye-catching descriptions the interns had written for themselves were things like:<p>* "Coming soon"<p>* "19 years old"<p>* "I'm a recent graduate of the University of Miami"<p>* "My name is Brittany"<p>* "My name is [redacted] and I am a 19-year-old Korean-American student."<p>This was the only part of the profile that was really custom to them, other than checking off a list of skills & available times/dates.<p>Don't even get me started on the usernames they chose to present to potential employers. (Musicbabi_87?!)<p>Their chances are pretty much zero. Obviously nobody taught these kids (and, in a few cases, adults) anything at all about professionalism or the fact that when they take a job, their job is to serve the employer. And they obviously haven't been reading books on their own that would teach them that.<p>Only a precious few mentioned anything that would tell me what I'd get out of the deal, how they could help me/be useful to me. Almost none even expressed any interests or goals of their own.<p>So, obviously, I'm not hiring any of them -- when I would have liked to. They got in their own way. This is, sadly, their fault.