Unlocking Youth Employment: An Approach That Works

By Mona Mourshed , founding CEO of Generation : You Employed

Employment is one of the most powerful tools to end poverty. Income from a job increases people’s ability to meet daily living needs, build savings, and support their loved ones.  

Yet, despite tens of billions of dollars spent annually by public and social sectors across the world to prepare unemployed youth for workforce entry, employment rates are often low. Changing this disappointing dynamic requires restructuring vocational and workforce programming to focus on employment, not just training alone, and for the duration to span weeks rather than years. This is even more urgent as artificial intelligence (AI) sparks rapid changes in the volume and types of jobs available worldwide. 

Generation, the organization I lead, is a global employment nonprofit that trains and places adults into new careers. We work across 40 professions, 17 countries (including in Latin America, Africa, and Asia), and 22,000 employers. Since launching in 2015, we’ve had 142,000 graduates. Over 70 percent of our graduates have secondary or vocational education, half are female, and 88 percent are between the ages of 18 and 29. What’s more, 90 percent of our learners are unemployed when they start our programs, with half of them long-term unemployed. 

We’ve seen that most vocational and workforce programs focus mostly on training, with little employer engagement. At Generation, training is only one part of our broader approach to helping unemployed young people access and maintain a living-wage career. Our seven-step methodology starts with mobilizing job vacancies with employers. We then recruit learners and deliver a six-to-16-week profession-specific program that integrates technical and behavioral skills and mindset for the activities our graduates will do on the job. Alongside training, we also offer social support services such as mentorship. After the program’s completion, employers interview our graduates for job placement. We stay engaged with our alumni while they are on the job and foster a sense of community among them.   

We track our graduates’ employment, income, and well-being at regular intervals after the program: at three months, six months, one year, and then annually up to five years.  To date, we’ve collected 57 million data points spanning this timeline. This data helps us understand whether our graduates are experiencing economic mobility for themselves and their families, breaking the intergenerational poverty cycle. Most vocational and workforce programs don’t track medium- and longer-term outcomes, often because they believe it’s difficult and expensive. But this does not have to be the case. At Generation, tracking outcomes over time costs just 1 percent of the total program cost per learner.  

The result? Within three to six months of completing the program, 83 percent of Generation’s graduates are employed. These outcomes are durable over time –- two to five years post-graduation, 76 percent of Generation alumni remain employed, 80 percent of employed alumni can meet their daily living needs, and 73 percent earn above living wage. Our graduates have cumulatively earned $2 billion in wages to date. 

We work with ten governments across the world. For example, in India, Generation works with national and state-government entities in a public-private partnership funded by both government and philanthropy. The World Bank co-funded Generation India’s first pilot with the government. This partnership involves changing how training providers are reimbursed by the government, as well as supporting existing training providers to deliver Generation’s seven-step process. As a result, training providers have seen employment rates increase from 25 percent to more than 80 percent within months.  

We believe that public and social sector partners could achieve greater employment and income gains for youth by redeploying existing resources toward holistic and data-tracked programming.  This is especially important now with AI’s growing impact on the labor market in middle-income countries, where entry-level job vacancies in living-wage professions are already declining. For example, in our Latin American countries, entry-level tech job vacancies have fallen by 33 percent since early 2025 (Talent Neuron). In India, entry-level tech job vacancies dropped by 42 percent between Q4 2024 to date, and entry-level sales roles have fallen by 45 percent in 2025.  

Jobs alone won’t end poverty. Vocational and workforce programs must equip youth with the right skills and the support needed to secure lasting employment.