Youth employment

Youth unemployment is twice as high as adult unemployment. The number of unemployed youngsters grew from 10% in 1997 to 12.1% in 2004. The unemployment of young ethnic minorities (15–24 years) is between 20 and 30%. Now that the economy is picking up again, youth employment is slowly decreasing.

The current focus on youth unemployment in the Netherlands started in 2003 with a ‘Youth Unemployment Action Plan’ submitted to Parliament. From this emerged the Youth Unemployment Task Force. It was charged with promoting the implementation of policy at national, sectoral, but especially regional and local levels. The task force was established in 2004.

The primary goal of the task force is to achieve 40,000 youth jobs for young unemployed people during the current cabinet period. On the one hand, by stimulating employers to make youth jobs available. On the other hand, by mobilising the participating organisations to place as many unemployed youths as possible. The year 2004 also saw the start of a strategy to return unemployed youths to school or work within six months.  The focus of the task force is harnessing existing resources, summarised in the three C’s of: Cooperation, Communication and Campaigning.

A special tax arrangement has been introduced to encourage businesses to employ young people. It enables employers to take on unemployed youth and have them retrained until they get a starting qualification. Meantime, various businesses – also in the SMB sector (small, medium enterprises) – have promised to create 20,000 youth jobs. These will be special jobs where young people can gain work experience for periods ranging from three to 12 months (while retaining benefits).

The main organization for job mediation in the Netherlands is the Centre for Work and Income (Dutch: Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen / CWI). The CWI gets 8 million euros a year to organize short-term activities, such as job application trainings and individual counselling projects, especially for young people who have personal difficulties finding employment. The CWI is also the organization where job seekers apply for unemployment benefit or social security. Many CWIs have a special unit for young people.

Another initiative designed to help young people find employment is the ‘job passport’. Many youngsters leave school with no certificates, so they have no basic qualifications. Their competencies and talents are not recorded ‘on paper’, so their position on the labour market is weaker than it should be. The job passport is based on competencies gained elsewhere: besides specifying any training courses, it describes the experience and talents of the holder, such as the ability to work in a team, creativity, technical skills, etc.

School Drop-outs
Quite a high number of young people in the Netherlands are leaving school without having enough starting qualifications that enable them a smooth transition into the labour market. Part of the Youth Agenda of Operation Young has been to reduce the number of school drop-outs. In 2003 the government set the target of decreasing the number of school drop-outs by 30% in 2006 and 50% in 2010. The Ministry for Youth and Families will continue with this approach and has also introduced a compulsory combined work and learning scheme for young people up to 27 and will introduce a broad, inclusive system countrywide to ensure appropriate education.