The government has updated the youth employment program

The government intends to create conditions under which young men and women, even before reaching adulthood, could decide on a profession and gain experience—this is how Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin described the updated program to support youth employment until 2030. The list of activities includes career guidance for schoolchildren starting from the sixth grade, simplifying the hiring of teenagers 14–18 years old, temporary employment by student teams, stimulating youth migration to the Arctic and the Far East. Experts believe that expanding employment opportunities for schoolchildren will interest employers, allowing them to involve students earlier in their own personnel programs.

The government has updated the “Program for promoting youth employment until 2030,” Mikhail Mishustin said on Monday at a meeting with his deputies. The first version of the program appeared almost two years ago. Direct support measures should cover 350 thousand people annually, indirect measures – up to 5 million.

In the new version, almost all of the program’s target indicators remain the same. Thus, it is expected that the unemployment rate among young people aged 15 to 29 years will decrease from 10.7% in 2020 to 5% in 2030, in the category 15–24 years old – from 17.3% to 8%, and the share of those who have undergone career guidance will increase from 5.9% to 35%. In the new version, the target value for the share of graduates employed after graduation has been reduced from 92% to 80% (57% in 2020). Let us note that the likelihood of achieving these goals is still quite high: according to the results of the second quarter of 2023, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova previously reported, youth unemployment decreased to 6.3%.

In the new edition, the list of events has become shorter by four points (27 versus 31) – the government explains this by saying that the old version was “more than half completed.” The most important direction, explains the governor of the Novgorod region and the head of the State Council commission in the direction of “Social Policy” Andrei Nikitin, is early career guidance. “One of the problems due to which a student or graduate cannot get a job is the wrong chosen profession. And the goal of the authorities is to route graduates from school, college or university to their place of work at the enterprise,” he notes. In addition, according to him, it is necessary to further simplify the employment of teenagers aged 14 years and older – this will allow children who are already working, but without an official contract, to be taken out of the shadow employment sector.

Among the innovations of the new edition is monitoring the level of youth unemployment in the country for each region. It is also expected that the number of participants in the program for the development of youth entrepreneurship will increase to 150 thousand people by 2030 – this figure has increased six times. Another new direction is encouraging young people to move to work in the regions of the Far East and the Arctic.

Apparently, employers will be interested in the program’s points. “It will be very useful if, over time, taking into account the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of minors, their employment will be further simplified,” says HR, business partner of the outsourcing company Severstal – Unified Service Center Yana Shaidetskaya. Such workers are in demand among Russian companies – as noted by the head of the youth department at hh.ru, Irina Svyatitskaya, thanks to the partial deregulation of hiring teenagers, which the government proposed last year, 42 thousand vacancies were opened on hh.ru in 2023 (in 2022- m there were 14.5 thousand), in which employers indicated their readiness to hire teenagers over 14 years old.

At the same time, notes Yana Shaidetskaya, the success of these measures will depend on whether small and medium-sized businesses have the resources to implement these measures in practice, similar to those that large organizations have. She recalled that many corporations (such as Rosatom, Russian Railways, Norilsk Nickel and Severstal) have been conducting educational work with teenagers and students of specialized colleges for many years.

Anastasia Manuilova