Educational Jobs: Youth and Employability in the Social Economy (original) (raw)

This study has been carried out to understand the priority initiatives that can be undertaken by the social economy organizations themselves and the institutions with educational tasks (university, secondary schools, training centres) to foster the meeting of the supply and employment de- mand for quali ed young people. The importance of the social economy for youth employment has grown in the recession years. While many enterprises were closing down or reducing sta numbers, many cooperatives and social enterprises in- creased their employees by as much as 2% per year, and in this study we even see cases where in the ve-year period from 2008 to 2012 employ- ment doubled. That big world of the social and solidaristic economy, consisting of non-pro t enterprises, associations, mutual foundations and ethical nance, etc. gives work to 14.5 million people in Europe. It has never been considered an economic element, but rather a social compo- nent. Over the last decades, it has proven to be an important actor in re- sponding to the need to expand youth employment. «The social economy [...] increased more than proportionately between 2002-03 and 2009- 10, increasing from 6% to 6.5% of total European paid employment and from 11 million to 14.5 million jobs» (European Commission, 2013c: 45). With this study, we intended to focus our attention on the impact that the social economy has on the employment of young people and, in particular, on how to scale down the barriers and obstacles that produce the mismatch between employment supply and demand, both in terms of the competences required by the labour market and produced by the training curricula, and of the ends and sense of the training courses and the need to prepare young people to enter and, above all, stay in the la- bour market. Hence, from all the material gathered, we have chosen to report and analyse the empirical material on 52 case studies relating to organizations operating in sectors with a hypothetically high potential for the expansion of employment among young people with or without suitable levels of education. Also coming about to aid the employment of non-skilled workers, the social economy has been characterized by a demand for competences that do not necessarily require a high level of quali cations. Howev- er, today, faced with the evolution in requirements from the popula- tion and institutions, it has ventured into areas and sectors that require growing levels of quali cations and specializations. The study of the employment trends in the sample in question provides a clear indica- tion that the increase in employment demand is mainly for young peo- ple with high skill levels. Starting from these premises, we tried to analyse and investigate some features of the demand for competences in the most important sectors of the social economy which, more than others, absorb the supply of workers with quali cations in the educational, training and social sec- tors. The aim of studying the demand was to draw indications on ways to build initial training curricula for some of the professional families required by this speci c sector of the labour market. As a whole, the in- vestigation is all the richer thanks to its comparative dimension, since it is based on ndings from the SALM project and takes into considera- tion the cases of organizations working in Portugal, Malta, Romania, Scotland, Spain and Tuscany. The work carried out enabled us to begin to gain a clearer de nition of the access to a speci c labour market, which is nevertheless of central importance for the sustainability of services for citizens. Where in Eu- rope, until two or three decades ago, support for the educational/training/ social care of the human person was theorized through state interven- tion and only possible in the most economically advanced countries, at present we are in a time, accelerated by the world crisis of 2007-2008, in which these educational, cultural, social and care services are man- aged by forms of a di erent economy from that of the nation-state. In this sense, it is important and strategic to understand the link between building employability for young people who want to enter this speci c labour market and the requests for competences coming from the em- ployers and the users of these markets, for the future of the educational professions, for the improvement of service quality standards, and for the personal and social well-being of all the actors who can and want to help innovate and transfer ideas and measures for the future of our so- cieties. In relation to this, given that measures are required to accom- pany young people in their integration in the labour market, we have developed, albeit not at a comparative level, applied research activities in the sphere of placement and job ‘formation’ in the educational and care professions. In addition, we have studied and tested a toolkit to improve the young people’s competences and employability, as well as their self- employment and entrepreneurship