Innovation: Movement for Employment
Portugal
AAI Domain: Independent, healthy and secure living (lifelong learning)
Active ageing is a process that takes place over the life course rather than starting at an arbitrary chronological age such as 50 or 60 years of age. The life course can be seen as a series of transitions – the circumstances into which people are born, go to school during childhood and develop through education and then work and live through adulthood – that influences how long people live and how well they age.
A key transition point is leaving education and entering the labour market as a period of unemployment in early adulthood can have profound effects on the career trajectory and opportunities for a healthy working life over subsequent decades. Youth unemployment (under the age of 25 years) is hyper-cyclical and has been much higher across the European Union than the general level of unemployment.
This has certainly been the case in Portugal where youth unemployment rates have ranged from 25–33% over the period since the 2007–08 financial crisis and there has been a significant movement of young people, often with high level qualifications, leaving Portugal in search of employment opportunities and a better life.
The Movement for Employment is a partnership initiative of the Institute of Employment and Vocational Training and COTEC, the national business association for innovation, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. It started in 2013 and involves companies, public organisations and the social economy across Portugal taking unemployed young graduates into their organisation on an intern basis to give them work experience and increase their employability.
The Movement for Employment is characterised as a mixture of corporate social responsibility and providing innovative ways for highly qualified young people to gain work experience and to stay in Portugal. Internships are aimed at people between the ages of 18 and 30 years and can last up to 12 months with individual and organisational participants receiving allowances and incentives to take part.
By December 2013 approximately 160 organisations had signed up to participate in the Movement for Employment and more than 1,400 young people had embarked on work placements. By 2015, the number of offers had increased to nearly 4,000 with more than 2,500 offers available.
This is an example of an active labour market policy that targets young graduates who are at particular risk of starting their working lives at a disadvantage compared to earlier cohorts. They are also a cohort which is important to the future of Portuguese society that has witnessed a large number of highly qualified adults leave the country for lack of economic opportunity leading to the risk of an ageing society lacking skilled people in the future.
In terms of active ageing, this is a life course intervention that seeks to ease the transition into paid work after studying that shows how it is important to adopt a range of policies and innovations to address contemporary issues.