The project has threefold objectives. The main aim is the need to understand young individuals in detail during their transitions frombeing NEETs (not in education, employment or training) or inactive to work. The others are, the need for a data collection and sharing tool/platform, an education plan (for attracting and retrining more inactive young individuals and, to bridge in communication and joint work that often exists between universities, staff, senior management and students in internationalization efforts and activities.
Young individuals play a crucial role on to build a sound economic environment for the future generations. They have potential toenhance the economic capacity and cause a positive economic impact on the society. As a major determinant of the human capital, education is one of the main factors for the economic growth. It is obvious that with the higher education, human capital endowment increases and, in turn, there occurs a boom at the labor productivity. The employment status and the gains from the labor market highly depend on level of the education. The higher returns to education in the future make education more attractive for the individuals. Increasing quality and level of education will trigger the economic growth. In that sense, this linkage between education, labor participation and economic growth, mainly governments in the developing countries implement several economic reforms on their education systems. Similar to other developing countries, Turkey also treats education as an essential component in facilitating development of individuals and whole society. Hence, government plays a leading role in financing the education and in applying educational reforms.
Lately, after hit by a huge economic crisis in 2001, Turkey started to experience a stunning economic performance allied to stand-by agreement with IMF. The sound fiscal and monetary policies and disinflationary implementations helped to recover the economic problems . Nevertheless, these affirmative conditions, unfortunately, ended with the global financial crisis which began in United States. The American sub-prime mortgage crisis transformed into financial crisis and had a serious effect on the overall world economics.
The youth are more vulnerable against to economic crisis than the adults. As they are lack of adequate support, the recession times hit them more seriously compared to the adults. This fact relies on the fact that their lower degree of mobility, experiences and skills.
Therefore, after 2008, the youth unemployment rate rose to 25% while it was nearly around 20% for 2004-2008. Besides, most of the youth are in their transition from school to work. These facts lead researches to focus on the characteristics and the needs of the inactive young individuals, namely NEET’s plus the ones who are not in labor force (this is exact definition of inactives), in order to let government choose to implement proper labor market policies . For youth participation into the labor market, suitable education or skills are crucial to achieve self-sufficiency. Therefore, likewise the other developing countries, the government and policy makers should give more attention to the education and/or training programs which increase human capital of inactives. The key element for this is to prepare suitable training programs not only for those inactives but also for the demand of the labor market. For Turkish labor market, it is proved that if labor was trained according to his/her job area, then the wage income might be higher than other workers who are not trained. The problem for youngs is the same for the partner countries in this project. One of the big challenge for youth is the inability to ensure smooth transition to work life after graduating from school.
To understand the needs for youngs in details during their transition from school to work by collecting data through secondary data such as Household Labor Force Surveys (HLFS, labor supply), firm surveys (labor demand), micro-surveys, focus groups etc. in both the country of project leader institution and partners.
Introductory and descriptive analyses will be conducted in order to understand NEETs/inactive population. The share and the distribution of the NEETs and inactives in the country will be estimated. Besides, the determination of the sectors which are lack of labor supply from the analysis is also one of the main focus point. (the data comes from the matching process of TURKSTAT's labor supply and HLFS).
The MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) system is prepared for instructors and researchers, which will be enchanced
by them for the modules and lectures they intent to. Afterwards it will be initialized to NEETs
Lectures (training modules), exams are designed and planned to promote employability, retraining and social skills of
inactive young individuals.
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