The future of youth employment: Four scenarios exploring the future of youth employment

This report seeks to identify today’s innovations that could lead to new kinds of job opportunities for youth under four alternative scenarios. The goal is to identify key leverage points to work with organizations, corporations, and other large employers in building future jobs for the young people, starting today. The report uses the alternative scenarios methodology developed at the University of Hawaii to envision four archetypal futures: (1) growth – the flexing economy, where increasing competition and automation force workers to continuously upgrade skills or risk losing out on opportunities; (2) collapse – the growing gap, where increasing automation reducing the number of both low- and high-skill jobs is grossly mishandled and results in a deep social and economic divide; (3) constraint – oDesk inside, where highly networked and internally coordinated firms become efficient economic forces and major employers of coordinated workforces; and (4) transformation – the amplified individual, where technologies only available to large organizations now empower employees to splinter off and create single-person companies and ventures.