Youth Divest

For a federal budget that proclaims it is in Australia’s future best interest’s there seems more attention on the older than younger generation. A $10000 incentive to hire over 50 year olds and keeping people working longer; what about getting more youth into fulltime employment? This Tuesday night could be one of the last opportunities to hear about the Commonwealth funded program YouthInvest. A partnership broker service connecting schools, business and the community to enhance job opportunities for youth by identifying and addressing gaps with the education received against local business and community needs and expectations. Not a quick fix to the youth unemployment problem so an ‘expense’ the Treasurer arguably felt the budget could do without from 2015. An interesting statistic on the YouthInvest website is ‘young people who can recall having 4 or more career conversations are 5 times more likely to be in work or further education’. Shouldn’t we therefore keep the ‘conversations’ continuing? That’s the question we as a community should now be addressing, not just adding to the budget blues list. Rockhampton Innovative Networking Group (RING) has as a guest speaker a representative of YouthInvest this Tuesday night at the CQ Leagues Club. It’s an opportunity to hear what has occurred in Central Queensland and maybe how to maintain the momentum. RING has been pro-active in career conversations with their C2C (Communication to Careers) events. Most recent being with Rockhampton Girls Grammar School; their Principal was most appreciative of the opportunity students had to meet and discuss their post school plans with business representatives. Perhaps RING could develop the C2C concept to enable additional ‘conversations’ with the coming demise of YouthInvest. As indicated it’s what we as a community do. The goal of the volunteer run RING is to help build a stronger community. Facilitating business representatives develop their local contacts to build their business is one way, investing time with local youth is another. If you’re interested in finding out what YouthInvest has been doing and how the community may take a more active role register for the RING networking evening by visiting www.ring.org.au. Exploring ways to get more local youth fulltime employment is in our community’s future best interest.