More jobs, please

Australia may boast of similar rapport between business and education providers, but unlike the German system we do not have a separate stream of vocational training that also provides basic literacy and numeracy skills, ensuring that the most marginalised groups are not left behind in the job market.

It is in the interest of businesses to promote vocational education and trades as an alternative stepping-stone to academia. South Korea’s ‘meister (master) schools’ of vocational education aim to redress the privileging of academia in a competitive graduate market by recognising ‘meister certificates’ as ‘prerequisites’ to owning a company licence. Such apprenticeships are an alternate entry path to engineering, mathematics or science-specific firms.

In contrast to businesses, entrepreneurs are seeing value in tapping into an educated generation yet to fulfil its role within the labour market. AcademyCube, a private Dutch enterprise, offers online courses developed in collaboration with firms such as Microsoft that provide mathematics, science and engineering graduates with industry-specific knowledge to help them upgrade their qualifications to the needs of markets with skills shortages.

There is an opportunity for businesses to tap into an increasingly mobile and optimistic generation of innovators and entrepreneurs who, given the necessary capital, can create their own jobs.

This idea is not restricted to high-tech start-ups such as Facebook or Google. Small and medium enterprises, often connected to industrial labour and agriculture, form the backbone of employment in many developing countries. An IMF report into the youth unemployment crisis across the Middle East recently recommended the provision of credit guarantees to small and medium enterprises.

Investment in unemployed young people is a chance to harness the skills and willingness of a considerable workforce, and an opportunity to profit from new and innovative ventures. It is also a chance to rewrite an otherwise troubled and melancholic period of history into the hope and opportunity so desperately wanted by millions of unemployed youths and the societies that must otherwise deal with their fulminating frustration.

Young people need business; businesses need young people.