Monday, march 22

It's finally here!

It's finally time for the seminar about youth unemployment in europe. It's being hosted by Communicare in Karlstad and I, Jonas Peltomäki, will be attending not only as an unemployed youth but also as a participant. These blog entries are my own reflections and thoughts and what i got out of it. this is also availabel through finding European Youth Unemployment Seminar 2010 on facebook.

Monday was of course the big day. The exciting day where we get to meet everyone. We started of with a little excercise to get to know each other and i think it went smooth. Everyone was very friendly and played along. My first reflection was that this would never have worked with an all-swedish crowd. We swedes tend to care an awful lot about not making a fool out of ourselves, and i found the open-minded people i met to be very refreshing and motivating. Mathias guided us into this big week smoothly.

Mrs. Ingela Wretling, the representative for Karlstad municipality, presents Karlstads actions to help youths to epmployement. Some of the actions taken are funding spent specifically to help youths in the age of eighteen to twentyfour. She also spoke of the system where we send the youths to work alongside employees to learn the ropes of their future employment.

After that Mathias continues to talk about the seminar's background and also Communicare. He finishes by going through the plans for the week.

During the coffeebreaks and some of the excercises to mingle and get to know eachother I get the chance to talk to the other participants. I of course grow fond of the UK and especially the scotts. It is definatly a top five dialect of the english language when it comes to character. We talked about some similarities between swedish and UK unemployment situations and i tried to give them as complete a picture as i was able. I also got several chances to speak to the others, and the flavour of the italians with their signature body language brings warmth to the room.

The lunch was great and it was very good that the museum restaurant actually had traditional swedish food alongside other dishes because alot of the participants where eager to try them out. The general discussion at the table, with influenses of italy, Greece and UK, were about different cultures, eating habits and social systems at work in different countries.

After lunch we were asked to write post-its about what our expectations would be of the week at hand.

I got the sense that we all had very similar expectations and worries. The expectations were about learning from other countries and staying open-minded and letting oneself be inspired by other's efforts to fight unemplyment.

Our worries where also similar in that we didn't want to get misinterpreted in our communication.

The Swedish national employment office took the stage presenting their view on the swedish unemployment situation. I say their view because i didnt fully agree on it. Don't get me wrong, its not that they don't try, but they don't have the opportunities or the resources as Communicare (and other similar organisations) has, which often leads to youths feeling forgotten or not worth a penny.

One good point was the dreaded near future of alot of the swedish work force going into retirement. It is a very real problem because these jobs arent being filled by the youths and this will lead to less tax-income, which will rupture the swedish economy quite abit (my alck of economics degree keeps me from holding a minor seminar as to how this could unfold).

He talked about how the work sector and the education sector have a mismatch in the graduates and the available jobs, showing lack in doctors and industrial jobs but a high graduation in computer science for example.

He also took the time to show us the website where swedish unemployed people get to search for jobs advertised by both the public and the private sector. The important part here i think is that its not the law for companies to advertise through this media about vacant jobs.

As an unemployed young thirty-year-old youth myself i often get the feeling that companies posting their jobs through this media can sometimes be the same as lowering standards on what kind of employee they'd want for their company. Far from everyone has this view but compared to this one media i know i have easily five other similar sites i use to look for work.

My own contribution to this will most likely be that even tho the emplyment office really try to help youths we tend to have to investigate our own job market, especially if we have a more narrow job preference. I myself am trying to find jobs within web development (which is a small piece of the hefty cake of IT) and my contact at the employment office said flat out "well, im not that good at your particular area, but i'll do what i can". This is fully understandable of course. You can't really demand that one person should be fully aware of over a hundred different job markets to satisfy the many youths they talk to.

The day continues with each country describing their unemployment situation and their efforts to fight for the youths. I found that everyone had at least one point very similar to Sweden, and several had even more points similar.

Bulgaria showed similarities in mismatch of graduates and available jobs and the disparities between genders. The army was a big help in providing work but weapon's manufacturing will sonn be closed down which will bring about problems i'm sure.

I was also impressed when the UK described their different programs to help out. It felt like they had more programs than sweden and that they were ahead of us when it came to identifying which skills the youths needed to strengthen to get employment. Even tho this sounds great they did have problems with funding for the youths both for living quarters and educationional opportunities.

Italy showed us a different picture. What i took with me from them was their amount of "black work", ie work not showing as employment. Their program looks promising tho and they were positive of their future. I liked how he spoke of the information centers helping youths to employment were sitting in at the discussion with the employer.

Here endeth the day.

I will finish off this entry by saying that the events at the dinner was hilarious. I had a blast and im sure I'm gonna have alot of new very dear friends in my heart after this week.