Personalized Support in Youth Labor Market Policy

In the face of increasing youth unemployment across Europe, innovative approaches to youth labor market policy are crucial. One such approach is the introduction of 'one-stop shops' for young people. Here, employment offices and other actors, such as youth social services, cooperate to offer young people coordinated advice from a single source. The impact of their introduction upon the young people that use them is, thus far, under-researched. This study begins to fill this gap by outlining the support approach of the German 'youth career agencies' that centers on gaining a more complete picture of the young person's life situation in order to offer them a range of possible support programs. The study interrogates whether the youth career agencies do offer more personalized advice for young people during their transition to employment than classical job center teams. It argues that, if the cooperative relationships between the actors involved in the youth career agencies are of good quality, more personalized support is likely to be offered there. However, personalized support in youth career agencies is still limited by the diverse specifications and target figures demanded of job centers by the Federal Employment Agency and also influenced by the professional background of the individual caseworkers.

Autorentext

About the authorMarie-Luise Assmann is a German researcher. Her research interests comprise comparative welfare state analysis and youth labor market policies.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Theoretical framework.- Methods.- The organizational context of participatory procedural personalization in encounters with young people in German job centers.- Three case studies on participatory procedural personalization in local youth labor market policy with different degrees of coordination with youth welfare services.- The influence of the individual occupational context of the caseworkers on participatory procedural personalization.- Conclusion.