World Youth Skills: Transformation For Our Collective Future

Our world is seeing two major problems in our current economic landscape - a widening skills gap and youth unemployment. Now, it is more crucial than ever that we focus our efforts to develop and equip our youth with the extensive skill set they need to achieve the life they aspire. Young people are vital actors to create a better future so our global community must take initiative in championing skills development through training as well as technical and vocational education. If we focus on building such skills in our youth, we can tackle our current challenges effectively and this is where World Youth Skills Day comes into the limelight.?

Keeping various factors and global challenges in mind, the UN General Assembly declared July 15th as World Youth Skills Day (WYSD) in 2014. The aim was to promote the importance of equipping our youngsters with the right skills for employment and entrepreneurship relevant to different economies. This day is also an opportunity to foster impactful dialogue between young people, educational and training institutions, employer and worker organizations, and policy-makers to design and implement different policies and programs for our youth and children to develop their skills.?

However, our global community must recognize that we need to significantly transform our education systems to provide our youth and children with everything they need to be successful in today’s dynamic global environment. And so, for 2022, the International Labor Organization celebrated WYSD by hosting the “Transforming Education Summit” on July 6th under the theme - “Learning and skills for life, work, and sustainable development.” The summit included youth, academics, policymakers, government representatives, UN agencies, private sector, and civil society speakers to analyze the impact of current global crises on youth and discuss possibilities for them to effectively adapt and meet the demands of our dynamic world.?

At the summit, speakers addressed a major issue of how much we stand to lose from the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, particularly on children and youth. The pandemic left 1.6 billion children without the ability or tools to continue their education. Now, governments need to be pushed to conduct a whole-scale transformation of their education systems, wherein we place our students and their needs at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. All speakers emphasized that ‘Quality Education’ or SDG #4 is an anchor in realizing the other 17 goals by ensuring we meet our promise to “leave no one behind.”?

Prior to the fateful events of 2020, our world was “not even close” to achieving Goal #4, so the effects of the pandemic further aggravated our challenges in ensuring every child is provided with their right to quality education. Leonardo Garner, the Secretary-General’s Special Advisor for the Education Summit emphasized that by transforming education, we can develop every student’s capacity to understand and use the “building blocks of knowledge required for critical thinking, living harmoniously, practicing ethics, justice, civic responsibilities and their commitment to global sustainable development.” Government representatives have taken steps to ensure this in various ways such as raising their budgets on education and high-quality teacher training, green and digital transitions to allow lifelong learning through reskilling and up-skilling as well as guaranteeing financial provisions for education to those in need.

To echo Garner’s thoughts, we need to emphasize that achieving Goal #4 holds the potential to be a turning point. We need to move away from trying to do things a bit faster and instead aim higher with revamped education systems that provide “a passionate path” promoting “self-discovery and development” within “a safe, healthy, and stimulating environment” for our students. The technological revolution has created digital resources that are our most powerful tools to support teachers in their classrooms and to allow children to grow into autonomous adults who learn every day. We must also turn these digital resources into public goods that can be widely used with little to no additional costs, particularly for the millions of students in underdeveloped and developing countries without internet access. This has the potential to prevent these countries from burdening themselves with a poverty trap by not having invested in their future human capital.

The need to transform education further stems from another major challenge - half a million companies aren’t able to fill vacancies with the right talent while youth unemployment remains high. With these two issues side by side, a great solution would be for every business to take an active role in hiring and developing youth with the skills and attitudes required in any workplace. They can help businesses tackle their two major problems - bridging the widening skills gap and remaining innovative to keep a competitive edge in a dynamic work environment. It’s important that businesses engage with our youth, who serve as their immediate and future employees, as soon as possible to maintain a good quality talent pipeline alongside keeping that competitive advantage.

As we at Ground Z work towards this goal, we encourage every educational institution, social organization, and business to take initiative to foster and develop the entrepreneurship mindset and skills in our youth. As youth entrepreneurs, they learn critical life skills on how to work with different personalities, how to become future leaders, and how to create valuable and innovative ideas that solve real-life problems and foster community development. Instead of being job-seekers, eventually, our youth will be job-creators thus creating a butterfly effect across our globe with their revolutionary ideas implemented across various industries. Fostering this type of entrepreneurial spirit is the ultimate goal that we as a society must collectively work towards.

Written by Yuvika Bhatia, Content Strategist at Ground Z.?