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Youth on the Move – strengthening support to Europe's young people
PUBLISHED ON 21/09/2010
Five million young Europeans are looking for a job. Many of them will miss opportunities because they lack the right qualifications or experience. 15 September 2010, the European Commission launches Youth on the Move, a new flagship initiative aimed at helping these young people to gain the knowledge, skills and experience they need to make their first job a reality. Youth on the Move proposes 28 key actions aimed at making education and training more relevant to young people's needs and encouraging more of them to take advantage of EU grants to study or train in another country. This will increase young people's employability and access to the labour market.
Top 10 actions
The Youth on the Move strategy includes the following targeted actions:
- Launch of a dedicated Youth on the Move website, which will provide a single point of access to information about opportunities to study or gain work experience abroad, including advice about EU grants and individual rights. This will build on existing initiatives such as the Portal on Learning Opportunities throughout the European Space (PLOTEUS).
- A pilot project "Your first EURES job" will provide advice, job search and financial support to young jobseekers who want to work abroad and to companies - particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. The project will be managed by EURES, the network of European Public Employment Services, and will be operational in 2011.
- A mobility scoreboard will benchmark and measure progress in removing legal and technical obstacles to learning mobility.
- The Commission is examining, in cooperation with the European Investment Bank, the creation of a European student lending facility to support students who wish to study or train abroad.
- It will publish the findings of a study to test the feasibility of a multi-dimensional global university ranking system, to provide a more complete and realistic picture of higher education performance than existing rankings.
- It also plans to develop a Youth on the Move card, which would provide benefits and discounts for young people.
- A new European Vacancy Monitor will provide an intelligence system on labour market demand across Europe for jobseekers and employment advisors. The launch is planned later this year.
- The Commission's new European Progress Micro-finance Facility will provide financial support to help young entrepreneurs set up or develop their businesses.
- It will encourage Member States to introduce a youth guarantee to ensure all young people are in a job, training or work experience within six months of leaving school.
- The Commission will propose a European skills passport, based on Europass (European online CV), to allow skills to be recorded in a transparent and comparable way. Launch: Autumn 2011.
Youth Health
On the youth health side, the European Commission will take action in the framework for youth employment to support youth at risk.
15% of European 20-24 year olds are disengaged from both work and education and risk being permanently excluded from the labour market. It is essential to tackle this problem, to provide suitable pathways for these young people to get back into education and training if needed or to bring them in contact with the labour market. Every effort should also be made to ensure as many young people with disabilities or health problems as possible are in work, to minimise risks of future inactivity and social exclusion. Public Employment Services are crucial to boost and coordinate such efforts.
The European Commission will, among other actions, establish a systematic monitoring of the situation of young people not in employment, education or training on the basis of EU-wide comparable data, as a support to policy development and mutual learning in this field.
Youth on the Move will be promoted through a Europe-wide information campaign. Special kick-off events will be held in Budapest, Hungary, on 8-9 October and in Bordeaux, France, on 14-16 October.
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