The report, Global Unemployment Trends for Youth 2013, said the global youth unemployment rate is projected to rise to 12.8% (from 12.6%) by 2018. It estimates about 73 million young people (aged 15 to 24) are likely to be unemployed in 2013.
The ILO report also finds young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults.
When young people do find work, it is often only part-time or temporary, leading to a “skills mismatch” with “over-education and over-skilling coexist[ing] with under-education and under-skilling”, the ILO said.
“Many youth are giving up on the job search,” the report warned. “Secure jobs, which were once the norm for previous generations – at least in the advanced economies – have become less easily accessible for today’s youth.”
It added that this skills mismatch is having a negative impact on global economic growth. “[It] makes solutions to the youth employment crisis more difficult to find and more time consuming to implement,” the report said.
“Young people in employment are actually overqualified for the job they are doing, society is losing their valuable skills and forfeiting stronger productivity growth that would have been achieved had these young people been employed at their appropriate level of qualification."
