Youth Unemployment, #CIPD11 and #ConnectingHR

 

   My favourite post from CIPD11 was probably this one from Graham Salisbury: Executive Pay: The Subject Which Must Not Be Named in which Graham questions the absence of discussion on today’s absurd levels of executive reward and obscene differentials between the highest and lowest paid in UK society from the CIPD conference’s agenda (possibly due to the CIPD’s own differentials perhaps?).

But for me, the other even bigger issue that was missing from the conference, not unlinked to the above is the truly dreadful level of youth unemployment which reached 1 million yesterday.  And it doesn’t look like things are going to get any better – the CIPD’s labour market outlook suggests that employers are continuing to hedge their bets on all employment related decisions leading to a slow, painful contraction in the jobs market.  It’s even leading to concern about creating a permanent underclass excluded from the prospect of employment.

This also came up at a session organised by Demos (and supported by the CIPD) on youth mobility which I attended yesterday morning (you can see my write up of this at Social Advantage).

Well even if the CIPD aren’t going to do anything about (though they have published some useful insights youth employment here), ConnectingHR will!  Following the community’s focus on graduate unemployment at our last unconference, we’re now planning a more serious intervention to help a number of grads get jobs, or at least get more prepared to be part of the workforce,  My own hope for this is that these largely individual actions will lead to some great community-wide conclusions, and we can perhaps put together our first ‘research’ report half-way through next year – and therefore have an even bigger impact outside of the community as well.

If you want to know (or do) more, particularly if you’re in London / the UK, check out connectinghr.org over the next few days, and join us there as a member too.

 

Picture credit: The Telegraph

 

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