Youth employment policy has never had more data behind it. NEET rates, KPI dashboards, Youth Guarantee timelines, the architecture for tracking and improving youth outcomes has become really sophisticated. Yet across Europe, the UK and beyond, disengagement persists, and in some countries is rising.

This insight page pairs two views on why. In "From ABC to KPIs and yet still no GPS," I look at the systems side: why NEET is a sharper early-warning signal than unemployment, what the European Youth Guarantee's uneven track record reveals about implementation, and why pathways (not single-shot placements) are what actually move the needle.

Miguel Peromingo takes the complementary view in "Do we know enough about young people? Let's ask them more often," arguing that even well-designed systems fail when they are not grounded in direct dialogue with the young people they exist to serve, and offering a set of questions services could be asking more consistently.

Read together, the two pieces land on the same conclusion from opposite directions: good architecture without genuine listening produces churn, and genuine listening without good architecture produces goodwill without scale. Youth employment services need both.

From ABC to KPIs and yet still no GPS

Across Europe and beyond, youth unemployment has fallen from its post-crisis peaks.

Yet the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) remains stubbornly high and in some countries is rising.

That matters, because NEET captures something unemployment alone cannot: how many young people are drifting outside systems altogether.

The International Labour Organization argues that NEET is a better early-warning signal of long-term exclusion than the unemployment rate alone. A young person can be counted as “not unemployed” while still being disengaged from education, training and work and therefore at risk of long-term scarring.

European Youth Guarantee: strong ambition, uneven reality

Europe’s answer to this challenge was the Youth Guarantee: a commitment that every young person should receive a good-quality offer of work, education, apprenticeship or traineeship within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving education.

Countries such as Finland, Austria, Denmark have been running youth-guarantee-style systems for decades. Their experience shows that the model can work but only when it is embedded in strong partnerships between employment services, schools, employers, youth organisations and local authorities.

Austria is particularly instructive. Its dual apprenticeship system, backed by employers, chambers of commerce and regional governments, provides structured routes into skilled work for a large share of young people. When young people struggle to secure a company-based apprenticeship, they are offered supra-company training places that keep them connected to vocational pathways rather than drifting into inactivity.

Austria has invested heavily in early intervention, guidance and employer-linked training rather than relying on short-term job placement alone.

Yet even in these well-designed systems, results vary widely depending on local labour markets, employer engagement and service capacity. In large cities, the breadth of employers and transport networks makes pathways easier. In rural or deprived areas, mobility, skills mismatches and service gaps remain significant barriers.

The UK and other high-income countries are not immune

The UK, despite a relatively flexible labour market, continues to see persistent NEET rates among young people with health conditions, caring responsibilities, housing instability or disrupted education.

UK data lends further weight to this picture. ONS estimates for October to December 2025 put the number of NEET young people aged 16 to 24 at 957,000, up on the previous quarter. The rise was driven mainly by young women and by economic inactivity rather than unemployment, a reminder that many of these young people are not job-seekers in any conventional sense and so do not register in standard employment statistics.

What this means in practice is that many young people are not "unemployed" in the traditional sense, they are simply not visible to the system at all.

This is why NEET has become a more meaningful indicator than unemployment alone. It captures disengagement, not just job-seeking.

What works in Europe: pathways, not placements

One of the strongest lessons from European youth guarantee experience is that single-shot interventions do not work.

The OECD and ILO evidence shows that young people progress through pathways, from outreach and stabilisation, through skills development, into work, and then into sustained employment. Systems that stop at "entry into a job" see high churn and recycling back into NEET status. This is not a hypothetical risk: evaluations of the EU's first Youth Guarantee wave found that a meaningful share of subsidised job placements collapsed once the wage subsidy ended, precisely the recycling pattern the model was meant to prevent, while many early offers were criticised as short, unpaid placements with little training attached. The 2020 reinforced Youth Guarantee responded by building quality criteria and outcome monitoring into the framework itself, rather than treating job entry as the finish line.

Effective models therefore combine:

• early identification through schools and youth services

• employer-linked training and apprenticeships

• follow-up after placement

• local partnerships that share data and responsibility

Finland offers the clearest illustration of the last point: its coordination structure brought ministries, public employment services, municipalities, employers and NGOs into a single delivery model, widely credited as a key factor behind its comparatively strong outcomes.

The public employment service becomes not just a broker of jobs, but a co-ordinator of the local youth ecosystem.

We are not lazy — the system is.”

(Youth Forum, Ulaanbaatar Mongolia 2025)

Do we know enough about young people?

Lets ask them more often

Young people looking for an education or a job are a diverse group covering the whole human range of talent, motivation, family background, hopes and fears. Employment services have over decades catered to this group like no other with high-budgeted programmes and large youth expert networks. Standard sevices like career guidance were initially targeted at young people before they became an instrument of life-long learning. Young people far away from the labour market, like NEET, have been cause for concern and major labour market policy shifts around the world.

But is youth employability service always grounded enough in what young people actually want and need? Do we ask them often enough?

Here are a few ideas which questions to ask them to make sure that employability measures are not only about them, but for them:

• What does work mean for you?

• What does it mean for your family?

• What does respect mean for you?

• What are you good at?

• What is your biggest dream?

• Do you feel safe when you come here? What would make you feel more comfortable?

• Do you feel heard? Do you have the feeling that what the service is offering you fits with your idea of work and your talent?

• What do you like doing to keep yourself healthy?

Young people most frequently appreciate good advice, career orientation and training support from employment services. They also critisise lack of inviduality, pressure towards job entry and being case managed by overworked advisors with little time and focus for their needs. The recent rise in anxiety and depression among young people makes services more complex too.

Improving the quantity and quality of dialogue with young people to make services more human-centered, engaging and flexible might be an entry point for higher trust and better outcomes.

What are your ideas for engaging questions?