A Grim Reaper stalks our planet in the form of COVID-19, laying waste to our carefully calibrated economies in a way that will, according to UN estimates, ultimately kill more people than the virus itself. Already, it has reversed a three-decade trend in rising living standards, plunged an additional 420 million people into extreme poverty, pushed an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation, reduced remittances, brought international travel and tourism to a standstill, grounded planes and left hotels empty. City centres are deserted as almost everyone works from home. Theatres and concert halls are dark, film and TV production is paralysed; oil storage tanks overflow with fuel as no one’s going anywhere! And the fashion industry is dead because no one is dressing up to party any more.

But – sales of craft beers for home consumption are going through the roof! Installers of home cinemas have order books deep into 2021; Apple is now a two trillion-dollar company and Jeff Bezos increased his net worth by $13 billion dollars in a single day!

So what’s a young person standing on the brink of his/her first job supposed to do? How on earth is s/he supposed to prepare for the unknowable post-COVID labour market? What are policy-makers and economists supposed to do to create new jobs as their national economies face the twin spectres of crippling recession and eye- watering numbers of job losses?
The answer, from the perspective of the members of our Global Youth Employment Coalition, remains the same as that endorsed by the 54 Heads of Commonwealth States meeting in London in April 2018:

“…invest in a systems approach to create meaningful employment opportunities for the Commonwealth’s growing youth populations…”

A systems approach is still the best foundation for effective youth job creation and, be in no doubt, there is more than enough work to keep all of us busy. But Post-COVID, elements of the system must be revised.

A systems approach is essentially everything you’ve ever thought to do to create jobs for young people done at the same time in a linked, intentional way. It is the “pull” from the demand side happening at the same time as, and synchronized with, the “push” from the supply side. In a traditional ALMP (Active Labour Market Policy) approach, it invests in all four main pillars simultaneously:

• Vocational training;
• Assistance in the job search process;
  Wage subsidies or public works programmes – and –
• Support to micro-entrepreneurs or independent workers.

But a comprehensive systems approach goes further: it creates an education system that prepares young people for the rapidly-changing jobs market ( – the one of which the US Dept. of Labour said: “60% of children entering primary school today will be doing jobs when they leave that don’t exist yet!”) It requires schools that teach young people practical, entrepreneurial skills: market research, business plan creation, budgeting and cash flow; critical thinking skills; team- work; presentational skills; creativity and 21st century digital skills; schools that offers career guidance and skills-matching so employers get the candidates they need for the jobs that they have; schools and Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) centres that train their students for jobs that exist – NOT for jobs that don’t exist anymore.

Further, a systemic approach prepares young people for the reality that a large percentage of them will never work in the formal economy with a pay-check at the end of each month: many – in LDCs, most – will work in sole-trader / household enterprises or the informal / gig economy. Here, a decent livelihood depends on entrepreneurial skill and courage. For many such livelihoods, access to capital is key: understanding the principles of debt management, savings, cash- flow, budgeting and realistic market projections make the difference between survival and destitution. Vital to enabling the growth of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is expansion of access to new finance such as equity or equity-type products, which are not dependent on mortgaging limited or non-existent personal assets. Equally vital is sensitive mentorship: the Prince’s Trust discovered decades ago that youth-led business start-ups were three times more likely to survive if supported by sensitive mentors. Business incubators and online mentorship can perform a similar role. A serviceable Systems Approach requires all these mechanisms to be in place.

Finally, job creation requires growth. A shrinking economy will inevitably shed jobs – as COVID proves daily. There are many things that governments can do to deliver job-creating growth, starting by promoting their countries as “open for business” and investing in large-scale infrastructure projects and Wage subsidy schemes. Employer of last resort is another policy tool: Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps created 300,000 jobs in just three months in 1933. The European Union’s Youth Job Guarantee scheme has helped 5 million young Europeans into jobs or training since 2013, reducing youth unemployment from a peak of 24% then to 14% now.

How do you implement a systems approach?

Many ways. There is no one-size-fits-all but at heart, a systems approach must be a partnership. A partnership between six key sectors:

• government;
• the private sector;
• the investment sector (banks, donors, microcredit institutions);
• the education and training sector;
• the NGOs, academics and media who write and practice youth job creation programmes – and –
• Young people themselves.

This last group youth to recognize that youth unemployment is their problem and giving them the agency to take a lead in solving it is an important key to successful implementation.

The process for delivering a systems approach, again, can differ from country to country, community to community. But logic dictates that something like the following schedule of work is followed:

Step ONE: Gap Analysis: questionnaires or surveys identify the gaps in the system;

Step TWO: Sector-specific Action Plans prepared by each Partner group to fill the Gaps exposed

Step THREE: National Action Plan(NAP) created by combining key elements of Partners Action Plans; the NAP to be adopted and resourced for implementation by all Partners;

Step FOUR: Annual Evaluation and updating of National and Partner Action Plans

Which bits of it need to be revised?

COVID-19 has been a cruel shock to economies everywhere. But climate scientists tell us that this shock is as nothing compared to the trillions of dollars-worth of long-term loss and damage that will be caused by runaway climate change and resource depletion were we to allow business-as-usual to return post-pandemic. Building back green is not just an imperative: it should be a legal requirement. The need for governments worldwide to wean humanity from its fossil fuel addiction was essential long before COVID: punitive carbon taxes and the eventual criminalization of the use of fossil fuels may have to be phased in to ensure the survival, not just of jobs, but Life itself.

Our Post-COVID systems approach to youth job creation must therefore be green and sustainable. It must, as the UN SDG 8, Target 4 proposes, require all of us to “improve global resource efficiency and decouple economic growth from environmental degradation…” The green imperative must be woven into every element of the system, from the education and training, to the mentorship, loan provision, career guidance and the overall promotion of growth. For, in the future, growth must be green, or it is not growth: it is deterioration. And young people must be trained to want no part of it.

The second area that needs revision post-COVID is the digital sphere: the fortunes of Apple and Bezos are evidence that this remains a Klondike-style gold-rush. Efforts to regulate and tame it are gathering pace – and young people must be educated in those legal frameworks as they emerge. For they will live their lives in this green, digital world: the New Nature Report published by the World Economic Forum says that it will add $10 trillion dollars to our economies and 400 million jobs. That far exceeds the World Travel & Tourism Council’s 2015 estimate that its sector would add 85m jobs in the next decade– a projection which COVID has rendered very unlikely. The tourism sector, so important to recent job-creating growth in many countries, has to re-invent itself to maintain jobs, let alone create job growth.

Such analyses must be at the forefront of young people’s minds as they prepare to enter 21st Century Labour Markets. So must the dizzying pace of AI and robot job replacement. Lawyers, accountants, bankers, retail managers… all are preparing to shed millions of jobs over the next decades as computers are programmed to do the work of many employees more efficiently. (Witness the Amazon effect on the High Street). Young people must be educated, and skilled, for jobs that will be created in the emerging digital, entrepreneurial, home- based, gig-based economy – not for the markets where jobs growth is shrinking. That is why the data collected by ILO and others on job- creating sectors is vital for young people. And the idea of a “Work- place” must be redefined and updated: “Working from home” may become the new normal – but, for many young people, work is where you meet, make friends, fall in love: that essential social component of “work” must not be lost in the headlong rush to home-working efficiencies and abandonment of traditional offices.

The other part of the system that has to be revised and revisited Post-COVID is lifelong learning: so many millions of people, mid- career, will lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic, governments must address the imperative of re-training them. Access should be provided through Singapore-style individual Job Training budgets or free, online training and mentorship provision. The private sector must create the space for mid-career apprenticeships to train, inspire and motivate the entire workforce to target their energies on creating and growing the industries and employment creation opportunities of the future.

We have to embrace the challenge of collaborative sustainability, retaining the values and aspirations of our ancestors to end poverty and bring health and welfare to all – while rising to the challenge of building a green, sustainable economy to deliver those benefits.

It will be a different world that the youth jobs of the future will create. But with luck, and good policy decisions by government, it will be a better one.

This article is an extract taken from the Parliamentary Network publication ‘Just Transitions’. You can download a pdf version of the full document here.