Dialogue on Youth Employment

The dialogue on youth employment, aiming to create and apply new, or build on the existing employment models, was introduced as part of the German Development Cooperation project “Youth Employment Promotion”.  The experiences from the project have shown that developing comprehensive and effective youth employment measures rests on cooperation and dialogue between all relevant actors, as the key component and the sole avenue for attaining a broad picture about different parties’ needs, those being the economy, education, and youth, and about possible ways to meet those needs. Joining of forces between different actors is also essential for integrating successful youth employment approaches in local and national programmes and advancing promotion of those examples to serve as inspiration to others to take part in activities for improving the socio-economic position of youth.

The DECIDE project, by relying on previous results and good practice examples, is to continue with activities designed to help intensify coordination and cooperation between actors that are vital for establishing local dialogue on youth employment in 6 selected local self-governments, namely: Subotica, Obrenovac, Kragujevac, Zaječar, Niš and Vlasotince. The partners come from public, private and civil sectors, and the project itself is to include the youth into the dialogue to mutually explore the most efficient models for reducing unemployment and ensuring the needs-based approach.

The purpose of introducing and advancing the local dialogue on youth employment is to create preconditions for successful dual education and short-term training implementation, while creating employment policy measures that show consideration for youth and local economy’s needs and education system’s abilities to provide employers with qualified staff.  The project endeavours to have this dialogue take place within the local employment council to create a long-term institutional framework for all future dialogues on improving the workforce skills and qualifications.  Support to selected local self-governments in boosting the quality of the local dialogue between relevant employment actors should yield an improved and more reliable planning in labour market interventions for reducing youth unemployment.

The experiences and recommendations gathered by developing local youth employment initiatives are to be documented and integrated into the local education and employment policies and presented in the national policy dialogue.