Published on : 24 April 20204 min reading time
As you must necessarily know, and perhaps you have even experienced it personally, young jobseekers are finding it increasingly difficult to enter the labour market. While the current economic situation does not explain everything, it obviously does not help to create enough jobs for everyone.
That said, even in full employment (a utopian situation that is no longer going to happen), companies that are obliged to recruit tend to act excessively. Just as they already do when it comes to cutting jobs, the excess is inversely worse when projects do not find takers for labour, all the more qualified, at the risk of recruiting anyone, even for an important position. Achieving full employment would thus imply the miraculous necessity of having a workforce adapted to the needs. This is therefore not the most important aspect of the problem of integrating young people.
Creating a new context
Obviously, with a better economic climate, we cannot complain, and efforts are certainly to be hoped for in this respect if we want to solve the employment problem overall. This situation would make it possible, in particular, to envisage new solutions to facilitate integration.
It must be recognised that the main problem is still linked to lack of experience and this has nothing to do with the economic situation. Efforts should therefore be directed towards the creation of a context allowing the assimilation of these necessary experiences for both the company and the young employee.
For example, I’m surprised that we haven’t seen the emergence of a more suitable intermediate status than the famous trainee position, which is generally not sufficiently regulated.
The assistantship, the status
I am talking here about an assistant status, a real job, probably part-time at minimum wage, which would be the serious alternative to the student job par excellence and which would be linked exclusively to the student’s curriculum.
Obviously, it is not a question of creating a permanent position, especially in the current economic climate; that would be tantamount to stealing a job from someone else. It is more a question of complementarity focused on common tasks that a student-assistant, therefore not yet a graduate, could be able to perform, provided that these tasks are relevant to his or her curriculum and defined in the employment contract. A quotat on a minimum number of assistants calculated on the basis of the workforce and turnover of the undertakings concerned would not be a luxury in order to give concrete expression to the principle.
Thus, an employee, having his or her assistant on a part-time basis, to whom he or she can delegate some of his or her daily tasks among the most easily delegable (there are always some), could take advantage of the time saved on his or her own training. This in itself constitutes a return on investment for the company in more ways than one: it has a delegating employee who both has a better chance of avoiding the stress of not performing all of his tasks and is better trained since he finally has the time (without having to take on his RTT or work time).
And beyond that…
A last advantage, with the assistant, the company was able to test a potential future employee who already knows the daily life of his company. When you see the costs of recruitment, don’t tell me that the idea is a bad investment.
And if the student is finally able to make a smooth entry into the job market and thus gain an experience that is certainly very targeted but linked to a profession and a sector of activity, and therefore more significantly than with a simple internship that is rarely recognised (apart from a few exceptions), we will have partly solved the time lost by young people with unemployment.