Smart, Young and Unemployed
It is 22:00 and I am sitting at my desk in my parent’s house. The room is filled with my quarantine necessities : pyjamas, chocolate, and a mountain of cables, chargers, my two headsets and other devices. I am glued to the screen, scrolling through LinkedIn’s professional blue feed : job reviews, TED talks, motivational articles and layers upon layers of data. My evening ends as any other : I send my last résumés, check for any new connections, and leave the site open to continue tomorrow.
This endless scrolling, reading of job descriptions and an occasional postulation is the mundane for today’s tweens. You send in your cover letter knowing that it has a twenty-six percent chance of being read [1], much less of being considered. Unemployment is an expectation now among young people, with around 17.1% of the European Youth considered unemployed [2] and an even higher number of higher-education students that do not yet have a job.
How is that possible? We know the drill, our tactics are perfected. The LinkedIn Profile is updated, the CV is shiny and promising. You make an individual cover letter for every company, and you know every answer to the interview questions they might ask, as unlikely as that is. We have all studied the videos and educational articles on how to look more presentable, how to speak, how to use body language to your best advantage. Yet, most students are sending résumé after résumé with little to no results.
You repeat those learned actions that you already know subconsciously with a sense of dread. Regardless of how good an impression you are able to make (In 2020 it takes a day to learn the basics, a week to master them), there is a sense of empty resignation. There is a hopelessness in reading a job description where you match 75% of the requirements, knowing that your CV will likely be filtered out and shredded by a machine before it reaches the HR’s desk. Where is that pessimistic fatalism coming from? Shouldn’t a young person stand higher chances today, having achieved a good education?
The well-known trick about the ever-improving education in society is that with collective intelligence, individual competition grows too. Whereas there were 2.70 physicians per 1000 population in Switzerland in 1985,that number has grown to 4.05 in 2012 [3] . Therefore, to obtain the position you not only need the skill, but also the ability to sell yourself better than others — a different degree by itself.
Finishing my Bachelor in Business school, I was surprised on how many courses were dedicated purely to making a good impression. Half the curriculum is centred on subtle and evident psychological tricks to swoon the interlocutor in your direction — from marketing to human resources, passing through smart web design and business models, most comes down to persuasion rather than content. The catch is that gathering those skills inevitably takes time from learning more specific, applicable skills, such as afore-mentioned medicine. My CV is perfectly designed but with little content to go on — my sister’s, a biology major, is impressively loaded but perfectly dull.
A secondary effect of this race to education is that young people understand their position better than ever. Statistics are no longer a mystery that belongs solely to the elite. Your position is well understood — you are being told day after day that the economy is failing, unemployment is rising and the competition is getting fiercer and fiercer. The media knows how to communicate those numbers in a colourful and alarmist way that will gain them more clicks and more screen time. And whilst the numbers may be true or not, young people internalize this attitude of despair, and every résumé is sent with a sigh of lost hope. Today even an optimist will send his CV thinking, Today is the day I win the lottery — it is never a calculated conviction of getting the job.
Another observation on the job market is that the values of the young people are changing. As shown in The Masdar Gen Z Global Sustainability Survey [4], young people are getting more concerned with the environment and social justice than the previous generation — the consequences of our predecessors’ doing are becoming more evident, and the youth shows a growing concern for its own future. However, the established job market has yet to catch up to those ideals — though there is a growing trend for economic social governance, the highest paid industries remain portfolio management and investment banking [5] whilst social movements and environmental concerns are still regarded as “cute”. Understandably, there is a growing sense of frustration among the youth, who often feel that they have to choose between their values and security. If you are searching for an NGO position in your region, chances are that there are only two or three organizations to choose from — offering you an opportunity of an unpaid internship.
Still, I scroll through LinkedIn with hope. It is not a hope in big established corporations with a cushy salary and scathing procedures of getting in — it is a hope for my generation. Youth entrepreneurship is on the rise. The tech-savvy tweens are adapting quickly to the rising need of work-at-home places, coming up with new business models and adapting to the current situation. Hopefully, a decade from now the industries will shift in the direction more compatible with our concerns, where we will not need to give up our integrity to earn a living. And hopefully we will learn to adapt to those new models with new values — a silver lining to a grim picture.
[2]Eurostat Unemployment Statistics
[4]The National News referring to Masdar Gen Z Global Sustainability Survey
Global Changemakers has an unshakeable mission of supporting youth to create positive change in their communities. A global pioneer in supporting youth-led development, they have trained youth from over 180 countries and provided grants to over 360 youth-led projects, which have had a combined impact on over 6,2 million people. www.global-changemakers.net
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article belong to the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editor or Global Changemakers.
