Employment Observatory
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Click here for the video presentation
The Cowork4YOUTH Observatory is a Web-GIS based BI platform which incorporates a wide array of data on youth population, employment, and skills. It employs visualisation techniques including maps, baseline graphs, and bar charts. Besides raw data on total and sectoral employment, unemployment, and NEETs (youth not in education, employment, or training), the dashboard gradually incorporates simple and composite indexes, such as the Location Quotient (LQ) which identifies relative concentrations.
The dashboard’s geographical scope refers to the NUTS-2 regions of the European Economic Area, which includes all EU countries plus the EEA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. In cases of missing data for specific indexes, regions and/or countries may be excluded.
The type of data visualised and analysed relates to a series of contemporary issues and problems youth faces, such as high unemployment rates for those under the age of 35, mismatches between skills acquired through education/training and market demand, and widespread disappointment reflected in high inactivity rates and silent quitting while still in a job.
The vision behind the platform is to build an observatory that will help researchers, policy makers, youth stakeholders, and the general public. In this sense, the data can be used to analyse, advise, and inform on current and past issues, as well as for educational and academic purposes. To our knowledge, pertinent dashboards are scarce and most that exist refer to the US or the UK context.
The dashboard uses Eurostat as the primary source for data, while also gradually incorporating data from alternative sources, such as Cedefop and OECD.
Transnational Research Network
The Transnational Research Network (TRN) will design the research and analysis of collected data. Most importantly, it will create a think-tank on youth employment across EEA regions. Based on advanced free-access WebGis technologies (e.g. ArcGIS), the Observatory will be the operational side of the TRN aiming to apply the protocols designed, to demonstrate with regular updates the data on youth employment and NEETs and to network with new researchers, stakeholders and policy makers involving them right from the start, giving them a sense of “ownership” of the results and ensuring wider adoption of policy recommendations.
