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Statistics are confusing. The unemployment figures out yesterday showed that the youth unemployment rate now stands at 18.4%, the highest figure since records began in 1992. But the TUIC have shown that youth unemployment was higher during the 1980s recession, before the current records began.

Of course it doesn’t really matter when unemployment was highest if you are one of the millions without a job. But it does matter in terms of looking forward. Because the 1980s recession ended and youth unemployment returned to its normal levels. It took 25 years before it peaked again at today’s level.

This  should provide hope for those who are unemployed that things will improve. Talk of a lost generation of young people without jobs is almost certainly exaggerated. But there is nevertheless a real danger that when things do pick up, young people, desperate for a job, will grab the first opportunity they can. They will not be in a position, economically, to make structured, carefully thought out career choices. We may not have a lost generation of unemployed young people. But we may well have yet another generation of people who work in jobs to which they are not well suited.

Which would be a great shame for the evolution of society. Over the past decade or so there has been a far greater awareness amongst the working population that it is not just to their economic and personal advantage to work in a job they will enjoy, but also to their employers’, and to society at large. A fulfilled, motivated workforce leads to a productive, successful society.

The awareness that it is imperative to find a job you enjoy has led to a boom in people turning to career professionals to help them make a mid-life career change. And the hope has been that future generations would not have to wait until their thirties or forties to benefit from contemporary career management methodologies, but that these services would be available to them before they started work. So that they could embark on their career knowing what they wanted to do, and how they could do it.

The fact that high youth unemployment will force them to take whatever job they can, as soon as it becomes available, may have put paid to all that. Instead of a lost generation we may well have yet another unhappy, demotivated one. And I am not sure which is worse.

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Tags: Career Consultant, career professional, Unemployment Figures, Youth Unemployment

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 6:23 am and is filed under Career Planning . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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