Young Workers Face a Growing Jobs Squeeze Across Rich and Developing Economies

Global youth unemployment rose to 12.4 per cent in 2025, leaving 67 million people aged 15 to 24 without work, while more than 257 million young people were outside employment, education or training, according to the International Labour Organization. The figures point to a broader problem than weak hiring alone: traditional entry-level jobs are shrinking in some higher-income economies, while informality and shortages of decent work continue to shape youth employment in developing countries.

The labour market is changing in ways that are making it harder for young people to secure a foothold, move into stable work and build the experience that traditionally turns a first job into a career.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the global youth unemployment rate rose to 12.4 per cent in 2025, leaving 67 million people aged 15 to 24 without work. At the same time, the share of young people not in employment, education or training increased to 20 per cent, affecting more than 257 million people. Youth unemployment rose in eight of the world's 11 subregions between 2023 and 2025.

The figures point to a labour market under pressure from several directions at once: weak economic growth, sluggish job creation, geopolitical tensions and rapid technological change. However, the most consequential shift may be structural. The problem is no longer simply whether economies are creating enough jobs. It is whether they are still creating the kinds of jobs that allow young people to enter the labour market, gain experience and progress.

The first rung of the career ladder is disappearing

For decades, clerical work, administrative roles, sales jobs, manufacturing positions and some technical occupations have served as entry points for young workers. They offered routes into employment and opportunities to accumulate experience before moving into more specialized or senior positions.

The ILO identifies declines across several middle-skilled occupations that have traditionally absorbed young workers. In higher-income economies, the consequences are increasingly visible. Youth unemployment in Northern America rose from 8.3 per cent in 2023 to 9.8 per cent in 2025. In Northern, Southern and Western Europe, it stood at 15 per cent in 2025, with 20 of 29 countries in the subregion reporting weaker job opportunities for young people.

The first job is more than a pay cheque. It is where workers acquire practical skills, learn how workplaces function and build the employment record needed to compete for subsequent positions. When these entry points contract, the difficulty facing young workers is not limited to finding immediate employment. Their path towards more stable careers can also become harder to navigate.

The changing occupational mix raises a deeper question about how labour markets reproduce experience. If employers increasingly need workers with specialized capabilities while traditional junior positions become scarcer, young people can encounter a familiar barrier: they need experience to obtain work, but need work to acquire experience.

This creates an uncomfortable paradox. An economy can become more technologically sophisticated while becoming harder for new workers to enter.

Low unemployment can hide a much deeper jobs problem

The youth employment challenge looks very different in developing economies, where being counted as employed often says little about the quality or security of work.

Many young people cannot afford prolonged unemployment while looking for a stable position. Instead, they enter informal or insecure employment. Nearly nine in ten young workers aged 15 to 29 in low- and lower-middle-income countries are employed informally, limiting their access to stable incomes and social protection.

The figure exposes a major weakness in treating unemployment as the sole measure of labour-market health. A young person can be classified as employed while still facing irregular income, limited protection and little prospect of progression.

In other words, unemployment and employment insecurity are not opposites. Low unemployment can coexist with a severe shortage of decent work.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces an especially difficult combination of demographic pressure and insufficient creation of decent jobs, contributing to more young people falling outside employment, education or training. The Arab States and Northern Africa remain at the other extreme of the unemployment spectrum: youth unemployment reached 26.2 per cent in the Arab States and 22.6 per cent in Northern Africa in 2025, while at least one in three young people in both subregions were NEET.

The contrast between richer and developing economies therefore masks a common problem. In one part of the world, young people may struggle to find work at all. In another, they may find work that provides too little security to support a stable transition into adulthood.

This is why the scale of the youth employment challenge cannot be captured by one global unemployment figure. The key question is increasingly not just how many young people are working, but what kind of work they are entering.

AI is putting pressure on the jobs young workers use to get started

Artificial intelligence has become the most visible source of anxiety about the future of work, but its significance for young workers is more complicated than a simple story of machines replacing people.

The ILO estimates that 6.1 per cent of jobs held by people aged 15 to 29 are in occupations highly exposed to AI-related changes. Many overlap with the middle-skilled occupations already declining among young workers, particularly clerical and administrative roles. The overlap matters because these are precisely the kinds of jobs that have often functioned as bridges into white-collar employment. If routine administrative tasks are increasingly automated or reorganized, the risk is not only that some existing positions change or disappear. The number and character of jobs through which young people first gain professional experience may change as well.

At the same time, the labour market is not moving uniformly towards fewer opportunities. Demand continues to grow in some knowledge-based technical occupations, including science, health and engineering, creating a distribution and transition problem rather than a simple shortage of work. New opportunities can emerge at the same time that traditional entry routes contract, but workers do not move automatically from one occupational category to another. Growth in highly skilled fields cannot by itself compensate young workers whose education, location or experience does not match those jobs.

Therefore, skills policy is becoming inseparable from employment policy. Education systems, apprenticeships and lifelong learning will increasingly determine whether young people can move towards occupations that are expanding rather than remain concentrated in those under pressure.

However, reskilling cannot carry the entire burden. Training matters only when economies also generate sufficient decent employment. Expanding qualifications without expanding opportunities risks moving the bottleneck from the classroom to the hiring process.

The ILO itself cautions against treating AI's employment impact as settled. Sukti Dasgupta, Director of the ILO's Employment, Skills and Sustainable Enterprises Department, said the direct effect on jobs remains unclear while warning that governments should not underestimate the risks.

The real test is whether a first job still leads somewhere

The emerging youth employment problem is ultimately about transition: from education to work, from informal work to formal employment, from declining occupations to expanding ones, and from temporary jobs to careers offering greater stability. It helps explain why the policy response outlined by the ILO stretches well beyond conventional job-creation programmes. Its recommendations include investment in education, lifelong learning and apprenticeships; stronger employment services and labour-market institutions; expanded social protection; a human-centred approach to AI governance; and macroeconomic and sectoral policies capable of generating decent employment. It also calls for particular attention to young women making the transition into work.

The breadth of that agenda reflects the breadth of the problem. Economic growth determines how many opportunities an economy can support. Education shapes who can compete for them. Labour institutions influence how people move between school and work. Social protection determines how damaging periods of unemployment or insecure employment become.

The next phase of the youth employment debate will therefore require looking beyond whether the global unemployment rate rises or falls. Future youth unemployment and NEET figures will matter, but so will less visible indicators: whether informal employment declines, whether traditional entry-level occupations continue shrinking, whether apprenticeships and training lead to actual jobs, and whether expanding technical sectors create realistic entry routes for young workers.

Economies can add employment without solving the youth jobs problem. Work that provides neither security nor progression may keep someone out of the unemployment statistics while leaving the underlying transition into adulthood precarious.