Lack of social skills "holds young people back

Citation

(2002), "Lack of social skills "holds young people back", Education + Training, Vol. 44 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2002.00444fab.001

Lack of social skills "holds young people back"

Lack of social skills "holds young people back"

Lack of social skills is a major difficulty for young people as they make the transition to the world of work. Whereas in the restricted company of their friends social skills may not be a problem, when confronted by the demands of a training programme the cracks begin to show. "Travelling to another part of the city, meeting new people from different backgrounds, encountering a new work ethic or the culture of self-discipline and responsibility are all reasons many of them come off work placements", according to research jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, carried out at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

The research aimed to identify the aids and obstacles to the successful progression to adult life which affect people aged between 16 and 25 in north-east England. Other objectives of the research were to:

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  study low achievers and potential drop-outs from national youth surveys by collecting new data on this group of young people who generally do not respond to surveys and whose absence from the resulting data has unbalanced the conclusions drawn from it; and

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  identify and assess the impact of local, regional and national structures on the life chances of the young people in the survey.

For many adolescents, the route to adult life and work is now through training, and with this has come an extended dependency on family or state. The authors comment: "Where dependency on family fails, the consequences are marginalization and social exclusion". The research also shows that many of the marginalized young people who embark on youth-training schemes do not have the social skills, financial resources or extended family support required in order to seek and benefit from the help they urgently need. Instead, the experience of many young people is blindly to follow instructions and advice they receive from JobCentres and careers offices, leading in many cases to them undertaking more than 1,450 different activities between them. This averages out at almost three activities each, with one older respondent reporting 12 different activities.

The researchers wanted to seek out young people who traditionally drop out of youth-cohort studies. "Drop-out rates from previous research has averaged 45 per cent and there is concern that this drop-out is prevalent among the lowest attainers and the disaffected. One important aim of this research was to provide data from an appropriate sample to compensate for survey drop-out and to resample typical non-respondents to get less biased conclusions," say the authors. "The main conclusion is not that individual motivation can overcome structural barriers but that those barriers produce realistically bleak scenarios of what is possible in conditions of social disadvantage. The tendency to blame the victim when there is a lack of structural opportunities is a hot topic for debate and yet many current policies ignore the very different values placed on individual learners in the economy of student worth," says Nick Meagher, project manager.