Promoting youth employment

Commission report highlights progress of the Youth Guarantee and of the Youth Employment Initiative. The College also proposes a New Europass Framework.

Progress of the Youth Guarantee and of the Youth Employment Initiative

The EU i's Youth Guarantee, backed up financially by the Youth Employment Initiative, has helped make a difference on the ground. Around 9 million young people took up an offer, the majority of which were offers of employment.Moreover, the Youth Guarantee has been a catalyst for policy change, leading to structural reforms and policy innovation across Member States. Although youth unemployment remains a key concern in many Member States, young people's labour market performance in the EU has overall surpassed expectations since 2013. There are 1.4 million less young unemployed in the EU since 2013 and 900,000 less young people not in employment, education or training.

The European Commission highlights today the main achievements of the Youth Guarantee and Youth Employment Initiative since their launch in 2013. It also underlines the need to accelerate and broaden the Youth Guarantee, and to speed up the implementation of the Youth Employment Initiative. It recognises that more efforts need to be made to support "hard-to-reach" young people.

Last year, this Commission took measures to accelerate the implementation of the Youth Guarantee by increasing the pre-financing of the Youth Employment Initiative. In his State of the Union speech of 14 September 2016, President Juncker stressed his commitment to “continue to roll out the Youth Guarantee across Europe, improving the skillset of Europeans and reaching out to the regions and young people most in need."

The Youth Guarantee is a political commitment taken by all EU Member States in the form of a Council recommendation of April 2013, following a proposal from the Commission, to give every young people a good-quality offer of employment, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within a period of four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education. The Youth Employment Initiative is the main EU funding programme initiated at the same time to facilitate the roll-out of the Youth Guarantee and give particular support to regions where youth unemployment rate is over 25%. All Member States are also making use of their share of the European Social Fund (ESF) to support youth employment.

A New Europass Framework: helping people make their skills and qualifications more visible

The Commission has also adopted a proposal to revise the Europass Decision. Europass is a suite of tools and services which support the transparency of skills and qualifications across the European Union. With this revision, the Commission aims to simplify and modernise these tools for the digital age and to add a new feature using big data to map and anticipate labour market trends and skills needs.

The new Europass Framework will build upon easy to use tools to help people identify and communicate their skills and qualifications in all EU languages. These include an improved online tool for creating CVs and skills profiles, free self-assessment tools to help you evaluate your skills, tailored information on learning opportunities across Europe, and information and support to help you get your qualifications recognised as well as labour market intelligence about what skills are most in demand and where.