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Youth unemployment and the role of marketers in creating new opportunities

January 27, 2022

As the country enters a new phase of COVID limitations, the School of Marketing is urging marketers to "go outside their comfort zones" to address the pandemic-fueled young unemployment issue. According to figures from The Independent and Evening Standard, youth unemployment in London has increased by 55 percent since the start of Covid-19, with more than 21% of young people unemployed and looking for work. One in every four women in London aged 16-24 is jobless, which is five times the national average (Office for National Statistics ).

In the United States, 42% of jobless young adults had been unemployed for six months or more. The School of Marketing, a skills-based marketing education organization, is now pushing marketers to go outside their personal networks to see what they can do to help young people. Based on the figures, creator Ritchie Mehta believes that the marketing business can help to reverse this trend in London and worldwide.

Partnerships

Multi-sector alliances are essential for establishing scalable solutions because they draw on complementary skills. While a single company can form a relationship with a local academic institution to meet its own talent requirements, collaborations between numerous companies and academic institutions can improve the quality of the talent pool available to everyone, frequently at a lower cost and with higher social benefits. While possibly more difficult to establish, such alliances consider the widest variety of interests.

Concentrate on win-win strategies

Initiatives that combine the public benefit with private profit are frequently the most long-lasting. Several case studies highlighted in this article show how businesses may link external activities with internal organizational aims and mix short- and long-term personnel considerations to improve business and societal impact. While many sorts of company-led projects can have a good influence on communities, those that are linked to a core business sector are more likely to be sustained.

Talent value chain

There are important places in the talent value chain in any business or economy where you can make a long-term effect. For many businesses, the move from college to employment, for example, is a make-or-break moment in young people's lives and a key driver of the talent pipeline. It is important for you to have a thorough understanding of the whole talent value chain as well as the effect a company wishes to accomplish before creating an intervention.

Maintain your attention on the future

Jobs and skills interventions will only be effective if they are developed with a proactive, long-term strategy rather than one that is reactive or based on past accomplishments, given the constant technological and economic upheavals. Apprenticeship programs that place young people in traditional occupations, for example, appear to be meaningless if those job categories are projected to become outdated within five years. Instead, creating apprenticeship programs for new high-growth occupations could be a better idea.

All parties involved must identify precise objectives and measurable measurements, which must be communicated explicitly from the start. It's also crucial to get qualitative feedback from everyone involved, including the recipients. This allows you to learn from the pilot phase and adjust your future actions as necessary.