The education to work transition of young people is key to a successful work-life and to fight
youth unemployment. The book provides an impressive outline of the facts and convincing
insights of the potential causes. This offers a large and broader audience help to adjust
properly to achieve a better life.Klaus F. Zimmermann IZA Bonn Germany This work points to
the youth experience gap as a key concept to explain the meager employment opportunities and
earnings many young people face.The transition from education to work remains a long dark
tunnel around the world. However this book shows that there are striking differences between
countries: in Germany the young people of today are no worse off than their adult counterparts
while in Southern European and Eastern European countries they fare 3 through 4 times worse.
The current economic and financial crisis has further exacerbated the situation for young
people in many advanced economies. Observers are divided as to the optimal design of youth
employment policy. Liberalists believe that the market itself should address youth
disadvantages. More flexible labor markets should also guarantee greater labor turnover
including temporary work so as to allow young people to move from one job to the next until
they accumulate the work experience they need to become more employable and find the right
career. In contrast other economists oppose approaches focusing on entry flexibility and
temporary work claiming that the former type helps only the most skilled and motivated target
groups while the latter only allows young people to gather generic not job-specific work
experience.
