Young people in the Nordic countries have many options and face obligations to participate in career guidance and counselling (guidance). In Finland, young people are subjected to multiple institutionalized guidance practices especially in educational transition phases. Guidance has various objectives as a public policy, thereby setting a…

Claims that low-skilled young people, and especially the men among them, are being excluded from the labour market have been influential over recent decades, contributing to an increasing concern over the issue of early school leaving. In this study, we use high-quality administrative data and sequence analysis to investigate the school-to-work…

This article shows how the Scottish Government's (SG) political management of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reinforced the economic goals of lifelong learning (LLL) under the skills for work agenda. Youth unemployment has been prioritized as the main social problem to be addressed, and most of the limited public resources for LLL have been…

Over the past two decades, an innovative approach to workforce development known as sectoral employment has emerged, resulting in the creation of industry-specific training programs that prepare unemployed and underskilled workers for skilled positions and connect them with employers seeking to fill such vacancies. In 2003, with funding from the…

In June 2005, the Victorian State Government introduced the Regional Jobs Package (RJP)--a twelve-month pilot program that attempted to kill two social policy problems with one stone. The problems were youth unemployment and skills shortages in regional areas of Victoria, Australia. The intention of the RJP was to create a "win-win"…

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) was founded in 1986 with the intent of widening the debate on U.S. economic policies by presenting analyses that provide an alternative point of view from those of various conservative research institutions. The two papers presented in this document were originally prepared for a seminar designed to identify…

Many work-bound youths have poor work habits and poor basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. Many work-bound youths, especially minorities and females, spend their first years after school unemployed or job hopping, with consequent loss of training and productivity. These problems are becoming more serious because minorities and…

This book contains 17 social policy essays on various topics related to labor and full employment policies in the United States. The following papers are included: "Introduction" (Stephen Mangum); "Secular Rabbi: The Life and Times of Sar A. Levitan" (Garth Mangum); "Young Workers, Young Families, and Child Poverty"…

The effectiveness of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 was critiqued. WIA was praised for providing an avenue for communication among state and local agencies during development of workforce development plans, potentially allowing individuals to choose from a wider array of services and service providers, spreading the concept of one-stop…

The labor market prospects of out-of-school young adults and options for improving the employment and earnings potential of all young adults were examined. The following issues were among those considered: demographic and social factors affecting young adults' employment prospects; employment trends and labor market problems in the United States…

This document contains nine papers devoted to the labor market problems faced by out-of-school and other disadvantaged young people in the United States and policy options and strategies for addressing those problems. The papers update the data on out-of-school young adults, review the lessons learned from past youth programs and policies,…