USA: Interesting new idea for dealing with youth underemployment and inclusivity

It was inspiring to come across this idea. Concepts like underemployment, inclusiveness, and mobilizing rather than networking.

COOP Careers

Our mission: Overcoming underemployment through digital skills and peer connections.

Challenge
Every college grad deserves a fair shot at a meaningful, upwardly mobile career. That’s the promise of higher education in America, and every year, millions of young people enroll, persist, and graduate on this premise, often with great sacrifice.

Yet nationwide, half of college grads (ages 21-27) are unemployed or underemployed, including more than two thirds of black college grads. (CEPR)

Even in the digital economy, a bachelor’s degree is not enough. We need social capital—connections, casual favors, timely referrals—as much as we need skills. These favors travel quickly and organically across strong and weak social ties, but rarely across racial or economic lines.

Ultimately, a labor market powered by relationships will only reinforce the status quo, amplifying residential and school segregation in the professional sphere.

A World Without Work by DEREK THOMPSON

The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing.

But as manufacturing shifted abroad after World War  II, Youngstown steel suffered, and on that gray September afternoon in 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the shuttering of its Campbell Works mill. Within five years, the city lost 50,000 jobs and $1.3 billion in manufacturing wages. The effect was so severe that a term was coined to describe the fallout: regional depression. Youngstown was transformed not only by an economic disruption but also by a psychological and cultural breakdown. Depression, spousal abuse, and suicide all became much more prevalent; the caseload of the area’s mental-health center tripled within a decade.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

Unemployed and Older, and Facing a Jobless Future

“If a counselor or psychologist “doesn’t understand how the world of work has changed, they’re not helping at all,” she said. “You can’t just talk about how it feels.”

In response to this concern, Professor Fouad and her colleagues have drawn up guidelines for the American Psychological Association to help psychotherapists better assist their clients with workplace issues and unemployment. It is wending its way through the association’s committees.”