WHAT IF WE COULD ADDRESS RISING YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT RATES WHILE CLOSING THE SKILLS GAP?
STL Youth Jobs was created to address multiple challenges that have a major impact on the trajectory of our region. Youth employment has the power to affect change in a number of important areas.
THE BIG IDEA:
What if disconnected youth were recruited, trained,
empowered, employed, and transformed into the future of our workforce?
Here are a couple of the challenges we’ve set out to address:
The Skills Gap
In St. Louis, as with the nation, we have a growing number of available jobs and a growing shortage of skilled workers. Over the past five years, employers across the St. Louis metro area consistently report a shortage of skilled workers as the most common barrier to expanding employment. [1]
One major reason for this is the skills gap – employers have jobs they need to fill, but our workforce lacks the needed skills to fill them. It is estimated that the skills gap may leave approximately 2.4 million positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028, with a potential economic impact of $2.5 trillion. [2]
If we are to build a strong and growing region, we must have a strong workforce. If we’re going to have a strong workforce, we must ensure that we’re strategically equipping the workforce of tomorrow with the skills they’ll need to compete.
At STL Youth Jobs, we practice an innovative solution called demand-driven skill building. We identify areas of growing demand in our region, recruit employers from these high-growth industries, and offer youth employment opportunities that equip them with the skills and experience they need to excel in those industries.
The result? We’re creating job-ready youth, who are ready to work in industries that are ready to hire them. We’re investing today in the workforce of tomorrow.
Youth Unemployment
Youth unemployment is a growing problem and it threatens the future of our workforce, which threatens the success of our region. The youth in our city have a higher unemployment rate than any other working group.
Over the last 10 years, youth employment has dropped by 12 percentage points.
If our youth don’t have the opportunity to work, how will they envision themselves as contributors to our society? How will they learn basic workplace behavior and gain a vision for their life’s work? How will they learn to manage money or be motivated to attain education and increase their opportunities?
DISCONNECTed Youth
Nearly 30,000 young people in our city are neither working nor in school [3] – called unengaged or “disconnected youth.” Research shows that unengaged youth create a huge tax on society.
The typical disconnected youth costs taxpayers an average of $215,580 over the course of their lifetime. [4]
We believe that these youth simply need an opportunity to create a better life. For many of them, that opportunity begins with employment. Research shows that employment has a transformative effect on many important indicators. We believe that our future workforce is ready and waiting to work, and that given the opportunity, many of these unengaged youth will rise to their full potential and transform the future of our workforce.