The impact of the pandemic on young people in the labor market

The pandemic period limited the insertion of young people in the labor market, as well as directly impacting the quality of learning due to the implementation of distance learning. This was observed in the report “State of the Nation: Education, Employment and Skills in Portugal”.

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In this sense, according to the study, during this period, “youth employment was the most affected and had not yet fully recovered in the last quarter of 2021, with losses of 27,500 jobs compared to the same quarter of 2019”.

In this way, the global crisis limited the entry of young people into the labor market and also impacted those who had already entered. “In 2021, only 74% of young people aged between 20 and 34 who had completed a level of schooling in the last three years were employees, a sharp drop compared to 2019 that interrupts the positive trend that had been observed since 2012”, says the report.

In addition, the drop was greater among those who have already completed higher education, although the employment rate of recent graduates remains above those who have completed only high school.

However, another point that the report cites is that, “the pandemic had implications for the acquisition and reinforcement of skills in different stages of life, compromising the professional future of individuals and workers and also the economic growth of the country. (…) Distance learning led to losses in learning and was an inducer of social inequalities, namely between public and private education”, underlines the document.

Thus, according to the report, access to universities during the pandemic “set records”, however, it increased the dropout rate “and there is no evidence of an effect on learning and skills of these students”. However, even though there are no data that allow us to definitively show the real impact of the pandemic on education, “it is certain that there were learning losses”.

Thus, one of the positive aspects of this period was the increase in adult participation in training that was verified in 2021, according to the report. When analyzing the job offers, the study concluded that “the labor market had a greater dynamism in the search for jobs skilled and digital and that employers have become more demanding by requiring more skills, especially digital”.

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