11. Education and employment

The way from school to work is often rough. Some surveys show that qualified school-leavers consider the past more favourable than the future. The less qualified are even more pessimistic about the future. A survey has been made interviewing 600 youngsters who finished their studies in vocational education between 1990 and 1992 in Budapest about their opinion on their opportunities in the labour market. Table 11.1 shows that young people with a skilled worker's certificate have a much better opinion about the past than about the future.

Half of them would have chosen another specialisation. Half of those who worked (two-thirds of the sample) felt that they could not profit of what had been taught at vocational school. Only every second person held a job suitable for their qualification.

The better qualified have a much greater chance to get a job than the less qualified. Looking at the figures on the juvenile labour force (see Table 11.2), it can be seen that in the early 1990s the proportion of the unskilled increased among the school-leavers because the school system could not cope with the higher number of the baby-boomers. The situation has improved since 1991 as secondary and higher education has begun to expand at a rapid pace.

One of the sources of data on youth unemployment is the Labour Centre where the young unemployed school-leavers are registered. The school-leavers who had completed a secondary or higher educational institution and could not find a job after finishing school for 3 months have been entitled to unemployment benefit since 1991. The unemployment benefit for school-leavers was abolished in 1996. Instead, the labour policy encourages such active tools as public work, training or job creation.

There are some data on the qualified school-leavers, but the number of young unemployed must be higher, since those having completed 8 or less grades of the general school and the drop-outs of secondary schools do not appear in the official statisticsĹeven though they are more threatened by unemployment. The figures by the Labour Centre reveal that those completing vocational school were the most numerous among the qualified unemployed school-leavers (see Figure 11.1). The number of the unemployed school-leavers was 53,913 in February 1996. 51.5% of them were males, 48.5% females.

While the proportion of the school-leavers completing vocational school is about 33% in the youth labour force, their proportion among the unemployed school-leavers is 41%. Training at vocational schools has been excessively specialised, and there has been decrease in demand for this qualification in the labour market. The reason for this is the crisis of short vocational education owing to the collapse of large-scale industry. After 1989 a lot of firms closed down their training workshops. While two-thirds of the apprentices attended practical training in firms in 1989, four years later the proportion was only one-third (see Figure 11.2 on the next page).

The role of large-scale industry in practical training has diminished, but that of the craftsmen has increased. As mentioned in the chapter on the curriculum, there are some innovations in vocational training. Some of them (such as the generalisation of vocational secondary schools) really copes with the challenges and has turned out to be successful. At the same time, some vocational schools change only the type of school (from short vocational to vocational secondary) but the profiles and the training method remain unchanged.