Educating young adults to be work‐ready in Ireland and the United Kingdom: A review of programmes and outcomes

Abstract

Across Europe, young adult unemployment remains an important issue. Those who have grown up in contexts of social and educational disadvantage can find it particularly difficult to find work. In response, governments, charitable foundations and in the rare case, researchers, have developed programmes of training and work‐based learning to help them enter the workforce. These programmes aim to improve the young adults’ work‐readiness (also known as work‐preparedness or career‐readiness), which can be viewed as a set of competencies including career motivation, basic skills, job‐specific skills, higher‐order thinking skills, social skills and personal characteristics and attitude. Despite a growing literature on these competencies, major work‐readiness programmes in Ireland and the UK are documented as trying to get young people into work quickly, rather than on enhancing their work‐readiness thereby improving human capital. We examine this issue by reviewing work‐readiness programmes’ designs and outcomes, in relation to conceptualisations of work‐readiness and Elder's () life‐course theory. In doing so we provide detail on how programmes connect to the socio‐historical context, operate in relation to the school‐to‐work transition, impact young people through networks of linked lives and influence their agency in young adulthood and opportunity for cumulative agency throughout the life course.

A series of realist evaluations of multi-component programmes with disengaged young people: What works, for whom, and in what contexts?

“…Moreover, in line with a human capital approach (Hamilton et al, 2013;Hutchinson et al, 2016;Symonds & O'Sullivan, 2017), the findings from this thesis showed that work-based placements, volunteering experiences, and mock interview events can support disengaged young people in navigating the transition to employment by developing their work-readiness competencies and employability skills (e.g., self-awareness, communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills).…”

“…Moreover, through engagement with a range of occupations, it was apparent that many young people in EMPOWER developed new skills and competencies, including, communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills. These findings can be interpreted within the human capital approach (Hamilton et al, 2013), which highlights that effective reengagement programmes help young people to develop and improve their workreadiness competencies in order to prepare them for employment and/or educational opportunities after programme completion (Symonds & O'Sullivan, 2017).…”

“…Interestingly, this focus on enhancing young peoples' skills and competencies runs contrary to the strategies adopted in other re-engagement programmes that have attempted to direct young people into occupations quickly, without providing them with the necessary training opportunities and the subsequent, knowledge, attributes, and skills required to succeed within the workforce (Mawn et al, 2017;Symonds & O'Sullivan, 2017). There is evidence to suggest that steering disengaged young people into employment before they are ready may actually perpetuate feelings of disaffection and reinforce and sustain a 'discouraged worker effect' (Wong, 2016).…”

A worldwide bibliometric and network analysis of work-based learning research

“…Regarding countries with the highest percentage of articles in these years, the UK has more than 48.0% of the total publications, followed by Australia (15.1%) and the US (11.0%). This expressive number may relate to the use of WBL in the UK and other English-speaking countries for more than 30 years at higher education level (Stern, 1999;Wearne et al, 2015;Symonds and O'sullivan, 2017;Talbot et al, 2017b;Talbot et al, 2017a;Hardwick-Franco, 2018). However, it is noteworthy a predominance of European countries generating and publishing knowledge on WBL (Jansen and Pineda-Herrero, 2019;Loos, 2007).…”

‘Education ain’t for us’: using Bourdieu to understand the lives of young White working-class men classified as not in education, employment or training

“…Whilst interpreting the NEET category in this way increases its diversity and reduces its meaning and explanatory power, it can be understood as part of a broader ideological shift whereby structural unemployment has been recast as a problem of individual participation (Simmons and Thompson 2011). However, the practical outcome of this shift is that poorly-qualified working-class youth have particularly unattractive options: competing with older workers, usually for low-quality employment, or receiving benefits conditional on attending 'employability' programmes which rarely help them find sustained employment (Symonds and O'Sullivan 2017).…”