Keeping young people in employment, education and training: Common challenges – Shared solutions

10–11 March 2014, Bucharest, Romania

Eurofound contributed to the conference 'Keeping young people in employment, education and training: Common challenges – Shared solutions', jointly organised by the Romanian Ministry of National Education, Ministry of Youth and Sports and Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Protection and Elderly in cooperation with the European Commission on youth employment.

The event took place in Bucharest on 10–11 March 2014 with the aim of creating effective learning partnerships for policy development in this area. Other partner organisations included the European Commission DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and the European Union agencies Cedefop and the European Training Foundation (ETF). Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth opened the conference, highlighting the importance of the Erasmus+ programme.

Eurofound contribution

On 10 March, Eurofound Research Manager Massimiliano Mascherini delivered a keynote speech on challenges facing young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs) and issues NEETs raise for EU societies. Highlighting the scale of the problem, he drew attention to the 14.6 million NEETs in Europe, saying that this number is almost equal to the population of the Netherlands.

During the two-day event, he will highlight the diversity and vulnerabilities of the NEETs population and encourage policymakers to take the characteristics and needs of the various subgroups into account in defining interventions to support these young people. Talking about the Youth Guarantee and the Finnish experience, he will mention examples of programmes that worked well and could be transferable to other countries such as enhanced job-search strategies and wage subsidies.

Bringing together a wide range of international participants, including public authorities and international organisations, representatives of academic and business sectors, EU agencies Cedefop and ETF, and representatives of youth organisations, the aim of the conference is to provide a platform to enable effective learning to aid policy development. Participants will be looking at interventions that have already shown positive results, what role education and training plays, the importance of learning partnerships, good practice in supporting youth transitions and how important active labour market policies are. The objective is to help define solutions to address the NEETs problem and contribute to the development and promotion of a common intervention framework, developing a joint policy response among the represented countries.

Download Massimiliano Mascherini’s presentation: The challenge of NEETs for European societies: Why a public response is needed now.

More information and the programme are available.