Introduction

The chapters of this book have built up a picture of youth employability training in the UK as framed by powerful national policy discourses, translated through regional policy strategies into a variety of entry route schemes, operationalized in practice by trainers, local employers providing work experience, and experienced by young people from wide-ranging and diverse social and educational backgrounds. Building our picture of youth employability training has required drawing together critical and historical analyses of national and regional youth employment and training policies, and the debates and controversies around these, with our on-the-ground ethnographic research. Plaiting these together, we have explored the complex landscapes of youth employability training to fulfil three aims: to investigate what it is like for young people to undergo employability training as a pathway into work in the current context in the UK; to capture the voices, strategies and motivations of local policy makers, training providers and young people; and to contribute theoretically to understanding of youth employability policy and training. In terms of the latter, we have adopted the theoretical lens of a post-Foucauldian governmentality approach, which has proved valuable in informing the way in which we have approached and analyzed the ‘discursive field:’ the national and regional policy spaces where the ‘problems’ of youth employability and training are identified and solutions proposed, as well as the ‘interventionist practices’, as demonstrated in the four training programmes investigated through our empirical research.

What the post-Foucauldian emphasis on the power–knowledge relationship between the contemporary, dominant framing of policy on young people, un/employment and skills, and the ensuing technologies of youth governance foregrounds most dramatically is the pervasive force of neoliberalism. This operates as an overarching, structuring discourse that articulates through the ways that young people's transitions into and within the labour market are constructed and experienced. Resonating throughout our analyses are the ways in which the free-market logic seeps into every encounter by young people with education, training and work, structuring both the ‘getting in’ and the ‘getting on’.

That today's young people lack necessary employability skills and are insufficiently ‘job ready’ on leaving education has been a dominant political discourse within Western societies for nearly 50 years. The fact that, in this context, many young people have almost routinely faced challenges in accessing good-quality work and careers of choice over this period has been a topic of high concern for governments, employers, academic researchers, media and families alike. The 2008–12 economic recession deepened anxieties still further, as youth unemployment spiralled across Europe, reaching 21 per cent in the UK, compared with 8 per cent across the labour market as a whole (Francis-Devine, 2015). Together, these institutions have systematically tended to conceptualize the problem as an individualistic issue, a ‘supply-side fundamentalism’ (Peck and Theodore, 2000) that positions young people– and their insufficient capabilities– at the heart of the matter. Perceived as damaging for a competitive and sustainable economy, a key activation within the UK, as in other neoliberal economies, has been to invest in bespoke training schemes to enhance young people's workplace-specific skills. Across the diverse regions of the UK, as well as across the spectrum of industrial and occupational sectors, a broad range of work ‘entry route’ schemes has burgeoned for young people of all social and educational backgrounds.

The starting point for this book is to explore what it is like for young people to undergo employability training as a pathway into work in the UK. Recognizing that this is a wide-ranging and somewhat ‘baggy’ category, and that young people's employment opportunities vary significantly across the regions of the UK (EY Foundation, 2016), we look at four different schemes in order to capture some of the diversity encompassed: employability skills in the North East; enterprise on the South Coast; internships in London; and volunteering in Glasgow, Scotland.

Introduction

This chapter explores the rise of the concept of employability and how it has influenced policy and practical interventions to address unemployment. As outlined in Chapter One, youth unemployment is a particular concern for policy makers due to the long-term scarring effects of unemployment (Bynner, 2013; EU, 2013). The liminal position of young people in society means they are often viewed as potentially dangerous if unable to access markers of adulthood, such as employment, which incorporate them into society (Mains, 2013). This chapter argues that employability is frequently utilized in neoliberalizing forms of governmentality, thereby shifting responsibility of gaining work on to the individual, rather than considering the various external and structural factors, such as availability of local work, the ability to be mobile, or affordability of childcare, that also affect employment prospects.

The chapter begins with an overview of the discourse of employability, exploring how the concept has been variously considered as a threshold of labour market readiness or, from a more processual perspective, as the need for continual skills development in a flexible labour market. It then outlines the policy context, and the various policy interventions aimed at employability generally, and for young people specifically. These have largely been focused on individual skills development, despite repeated evaluations that demonstrate they have poor outcomes and can be ineffective in enabling access to the youth labour market. Our case study of an employability programme in the North East contributes to knowledge as to why this may be so. The programme reflects the discourse of employability, but also reveals an additional complexity: the very real difficulties involved in providing support for young people who may be at very different ‘distances’ from entering the labour market or establishing themselves in a stable career.

Discourses of employability: labour market readiness or processual skills development?

A simple definition of ‘employability’ is that it is the ability to be employed. This implicitly infers that employability is an individual quest, reliant on personal skills, experiences and aptitudes (Hillage and Pollard, 1998; Peck and Theodore, 2000; Devins and Hogarth, 2005; Houston, 2005; McQuaid and Lindsay, 2005; McQuaid et al, 2005; Lindsay and Houston, 2011; Adam et al, 2017; Crisp and Powell, 2017). However, this understanding is somewhat controversial, widely criticized for neglecting the necessary and fundamental component of there being available work for someone to gain.

Introduction

This chapter explores the growing use of internships as a route into certain careers of choice. Although internships have been common practice in a few professions since the 1960s, such placements, typically unpaid, burgeoned during the years of the 2008–12 recession, becoming a widespread strategy deployed both by organizations to enhance their workforce and young people keen to enhance their CVs with work experience at a time when paid jobs were in short supply. This chapter argues, however, that internships, particularly during the years of the 2008–12 economic crisis, are a highly exclusive entry route scheme, powerfully structured by social class. They vary considerably in terms of quality, and it is, in the main, only those young people with family resources who are able to access and benefit from the most prestigious internships.

The chapter begins with an overview of the bifurcated discourse of internships. On the one hand, they are positioned as a valuable means by which young people can access muchneeded work experience to gain paid employment in a chosen career, but, on the other, they have come to be heavily critiqued as a highly exploitative means by which organizations enjoy talent for free. We then interrogate the policy landscape of internships, revealing this also to be a highly contested terrain that reflects the opposing discourses. Our case study of internships in London concentrates on a highly prestigious ‘blue-chip’ scheme accessed primarily by young, middle-class undergraduates from elite universities. This scheme is compared with the experiences of young people on other schemes that offer far less in terms of remuneration and work experience. Our research reveals that the young people with middle-class backgrounds enjoy contexts and institutions– such as family, their higher education institutions and the employing organization offering the internships– that ‘helicopter’ over their transitions. In contrast, for many young people from working-class backgrounds on other internship schemes, a ‘no-rescue’, ‘hands-off ‘ culture prevails.

Introduction

This chapter turns to investigate volunteering, much vaunted in recent years as a valuable means by which young people may gain valuable experience for work and careers. The 2008–12 economic recession fuelled this discourse more powerfully, and it became mainstreamed into government advice to young people struggling to access jobs. As such, the distinction between traditional understandings of volunteering as an altruistic activity and volunteering as working unpaid has become rather messily blurred. Volunteering has thus emerged as a powerful technology by which to govern young people, not only to become individually accountable for their work futures, but to develop a range of other ‘responsible’ performances and subjectivities associated with active citizenship.

This chapter commences with a discussion of the discursive shift in youth volunteering that has transformed traditional conceptualizations of volunteering as a performance of active citizenship to seeing the activity in more instrumental terms. We then analyze the policy context, to argue that policies to encourage more youth volunteering are based on a conundrum: the fact that there is no robust evidence to support the view that volunteering is a beneficial means by which to access paid employment. Our case study of a volunteering organization in Scotland that delivers bespoke employability training to young people and includes daily spells of volunteering in a range of voluntary sector workplaces provides some insight into why this might be the case. A lack of interest in young people's development by some of the managers in work experience placements can lead to the young people ‘time filling’ with meaningless, poor-quality work. Further, the lack of engagement by private sector employers makes it difficult for young people to gain experience in organizations offering paid employment opportunities. It is important to recognize, however, that paid employment is not an appropriate outcome for every young person. Our research also underscores the significant contribution of trainers to other beneficial outcomes of volunteering programmes, such as the confidence and wellbeing of young trainees. For some, the enhanced levels of self-worth which the programme delivered was a success in its own right.

There is an emerging body of legal thought directed at contemporary profiling and data science. Some of this focuses on limiting ‘human computability’, some addresses questions of ‘manipulation’ and ‘behavioural optimisation’, and some suggests ways to introduce friction into the information environment to interrupt the translation of data into meaning. This chapter looks at how some of these ideas might be implemented as computational legal applications. It argues that the legal subject of algorithmic accountability can be expanded into a rights-bearing entity that can actively contest how it is computationally interpreted, through mechanisms of ‘contestation by design’. The chapter also describes the utility of concepts like ‘context’ for building boundaries and friction into information architectures, not simply in terms of information flow but also for constraining how the design of those architectures influences and structures behaviour. Finally, it suggests the shape of a new ‘composite’ legal person as a mechanism to constrain profiling behavior by producing an identity as an interface to the ‘world state’ it inhabits.

It has been twelve years since our article “Women in Computer Science: No Shortage Here!” (Othman and Latih, 2006) was published. It is disheartening that after more than a decade, gender disparity in computer science (CS) is still an issue. Among important findings of our previous study is that young Malaysian females and males have a markedly different attitude toward science and mathematics compared with their Western counterparts. CS and information technology (IT) is not viewed as a masculine field by young Malaysians, which is a key reason why this nation does not encounter the problem of too few females being interested in pursuing a degree in CS/IT.

Historically, it is known that women had an important role in computing. History lessons on computer science narrate that women were some of the first software engineers until technology and practices changed the role of women as programmers.

Since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms starting in 1978, the Chinese government has continuously improved the basic laws and regulations that guarantee women’s economic rights and employment rights. Chinese women can participate equally in economic development, and enjoy the fruits of reform and development on an equal footing with men. In China (Aaltio and Huang, 2007), working women now account for 47.0% of the total labor force, higher than the world average of 40.8%. However, in the computing industry, the proportion of female practitioners in China is about 7% (Proginn and Juejin, 2017; Proginn, 2018), significantly lower than 17% in United States (Elizabeth, 2017). The problem of the small proportion of Chinese computing female practitioners should be remedied.