Making education work

Around the world we have at least 75 million young people who are unemployed. In many countries more young people are staying on in post secondary education, yet when they finish their studies they are still considered job seekers without the necessary skills. In many countries young people find it hard to move from education to employment.

A recent study by the McKinsey Center for Government 'Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works' explores the complicated journey from education to employment and discovers that too many young people are getting lost along the way, caught in the twin crises of a shortage of jobs and a shortage of skills.

The report highlights six findings:

1.         Employers, education providers and youth live in parallel universes and have fundamentally different perceptions of the same situation. Many employers and young people feel that education has not prepared youth properly for work, while most education providers believe that they have prepared new graduates for work. Employers and educators are disconnected. They hardly communicate with each other. Educators often admit that they are unable to estimate the job placement rates of their graduates, and many youths admit that they were not well informed as to which studies to undertake that would lead to job openings and good wage levels.

2.         The education-to-employment journey is fraught with obstacles. More than half of students feel that they have not made the right choice in their selection of institution or field of study. Many young people say that on-the-job-training and hands-on-learning are the most effective instructional techniques and many say that the curricula they are enrolled in do not use these techniques.

3.         The education-to-employment system fails for most employers and young people. Only a third of employers believe that they are getting the talent they require when they recruit young people. They succeed at this because they reach out regularly to education providers and youths, offering them time, skills and job experience and exposure. Many young people end up feeling disheartened as they feel they have not made the right choice about their courses and careers.

4.         Innovative and effective programmes around the world have important elements in common. The most successful programmes are those where education providers and employers actively step into one another's worlds. Employers help design curricula and offer employees to teach students while education providers have students spend half their time on job sites. Employers and education providers work with their students early and intensely and together ensure that the education-to-employment journey is treated as a continuum.

5.         Creating a successful education-to-employment system requires new incentives and structures. Young people and parents need better data to make informed choices about career options and education and training pathways. Education providers need to gather and disseminate data about job placements and give young people a clear sense of what to expect when they leave school or when they take up a course of study. This would help education institutions what to teach and how to connect their students to the job market. Employers, education providers and training institutions need to work together to solve skill gaps and share the costs. Countries need system integrators who take a high level view of the fragmented education-to-employment system and work with employers and education providers to develop skill solutions, gather data and identify and disseminate good practice and positive examples.

6.         Education-to-employment solutions need to scale up. Education providers need to use the internet to provide more effective and relevant courses at lower costs and reach more young people. Serious game simulations are expected to become the apprenticeships of the 21st century, where the future of hands-on-learning may well be hands-off, as online simulations are designed to offer tailored, detailed, practical experience to large numbers at a comparatively low cost. Education providers can combine customisation and scale by offering a standard core curriculum complemented by employer-specific top-ups.

In the coming months we will be working hard with education and training providers, employers, unions and civil society to design a system that works for our young people and get the worlds of education providers, employers and civil society to step into each other.

Dreams to nightmares

Somali migrants spend between €2,100 and €3,500 to travel from Mogadishu in Somalia to Malta. This includes the crossing between Libya and Malta, which often amounts to around €630. Somalis get a better price than other migrants, as they travel in larger numbers.

Derek Lutterbeck interviews Somali migrants living in Malta in his contribution to a new book published last year by the University of Malta and edited by Professor Peter G. Xuereb.

In his contribution, Lutterbeck says the price of the voyage on land through the Sahara and on sea from Mogadishu to Malta could be higher "if the migrants were cheated by the smugglers or brokers and thus had to pay twice or even more times for a certain leg of the trip, or if they were detained and had to bribe themselves out of prison".

Somali migrants living in Malta told Lutterbeck that around €150 each is paid to the Libyan broker to organise the trip; the rest go to the smugglers. They have to pay in cash and in advance. If the sea is too rough and the migrants refuse to leave they lose the money they paid.

The Somali migrants say that their extended family provides them with the money they need for the voyage. If the family does not have enough savings, they either sell part of their land or borrow money from friends. Some of the migrants also get money from their relatives or friends who have already managed to take the voyage and live overseas.

The migrants also often work on their way to raise funds for their onward journey to Europe. According to estimates, since 1988, 19,000 migrants failed to reach their destination, having drowned in the Mediterranean.

Last March Jean-Baptiste Sourou of the Saint Augustine University of Tanzania published a study entitled 'Mediterranean Sea: The Drowned Dreams of Africans.'

In it, Sourou recounts how every year thousands of African immigrants die in their attempt to reach Europe through the Mediterranean Sea.

'They travel in extremely dangerous conditions from Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, without food, without compass, neither water nor whatever. There are young people, elders, men, women, entire families. They search for a better life. Those who embark on it are never sure of making it. But those who make it do not find the dreamed-of Europe, thus many of them end up going mad, become sick and fall into a depression."

Evarist Bartolo is Minister for Education