Through education to employment: exploring transformative workplace learning opportunities for young people in the post-GFC context

Abstract

This paper considers the possibilities for transformational workplace learning opportunities to support European young people in transition to sustainable employment in the post-GFC context. The GFC has created a context where the youth labour market — always more tenuous than the adult labour market — has reached new levels of precarity. Commentators suggest that many youth, even those who once would have fared well, now face the prospect of becoming part of a ‘lost generation’. The paper suggests that the limits and possibilities for such opportunities for those young people who appear to have little prospect of sustainable employment in this context are, in part, defined by the learning ethos of the workplaces in which they engage. 
 In acknowledging common social inclusion policy commitments, the paper opens with the ‘call to action’ by providing an overview of the youth employment situation and, secondly, argues for a broader engagement with the idea of a new educational settlement where education and employment must now be fundamentally linked. Drawing on a three-year project based in Melbourne, Australia, the paper argues for the notion of an intergenerational commitment within workplaces. The paper closes with a consideration of the implications and possibilities of such a commitment for workplace learning by students and their co-learners in industry settings.