What does our labour market look like for educated youth?
The student movement for the reformation of the quota system in government jobs highlights the importance and urgency of re-evaluating the current labour market scenario in Bangladesh. The reason behind the educated youth's overwhelming preference for public sector jobs, particularly those in Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS), must be understood in a greater detail and also through a critical lens of youth unemployment.
In this context, we should also keep in mind that Bangladesh is going through a demographic transition with the youth (15-29 years old) constituting 36.7 percent of the total labour force (LFS 2022). However, according to the Labour Force Survey (LFS) 2022 data, the rate of unemployment among the youth (eight percent) is much higher than the national average (3.53 percent). Among the unemployed (reported to be unemployed for more than two years), as many as 14.7 percent are also found to have received tertiary education. This poll of educated unemployed is certainly a serious concern for the country's labour market. Besides, as many as 22 percent of the youth are found to be NEET (not in employment, education and training), with the male NEET being 16.2 percent and the female NEET being as high as 27.1 percent. With such a large proportion of our youth not being in the mainstream labour market activities and another significant proportion being unemployed, one of the most crucial challenges of Bangladesh's labour market is to effectively utilise our favourable demographic profile.
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However, from the demand-side point of view, if we explore the employment opportunities for the educated youth in particular (those with tertiary level of education), for the salary-based employment, there are basically two broad streams: public sector jobs and private sector employment. In addition, there is a separate stream comprising different self-employment activities, including entrepreneurial activities, freelance work, and digital platform economy-based jobs. Although all such jobs require a common set of eligibility in terms of education and skills, it is obvious that each of these categories requires different skill sets of its own. In this context, high-skilled private sector employment in most cases requires strong interpersonal communication skills both in the native language as well as in English, along with computing and data management skills and teamwork in many cases.
Our educational institutions, starting from the primary level, do not offer such skills with due importance and, as a result, a large mass of the youth population, especially those from the rural areas and underprivileged backgrounds, seriously lack such skills in most of the cases. In addition, skill mismatch due to poor academia-industry linkage is also partly responsible for shrinking the domain of private sector employment for graduates. Therefore, it can be argued that a "push factor" is working for a significant mass of educated youth searching for high-skilled jobs with decent salary and benefit structure. In addition, there are also complaints and accusations of nepotism and favouritism, which discourage the young people coming from underprivileged backgrounds to compete for them.
On the other hand, we can say that there is a "pull factor" for public sector jobs and it is not only due to the reasonably decent salary and benefits, but also for the stability and job security associated with employment in the public sector. In addition, public sector employment is traditionally considered prestigious, with high possibilities for climbing up the occupational ladder, and is also seen as a source of power and social status. It is therefore not surprising that a young graduate will consider public sector jobs, especially the BCS cadre ones, as the most desirable.
It is not only in the context of salary-based employment but also for different self-employment ventures that there exist several challenges, all of which again "pushes away" the potential young graduates from such ventures. On the one hand, there are challenges in the context of availability of credit, market access, and required infrastructural support, while on the other hand, there are limited policy support and strategic directions for those who want to build and progress their career with their own efforts. A relevant question in this context is whether we actually need so many graduates or not, and whether we should put greater emphasis on specialised short courses, diplomas and technical and vocational education and training (TVET)-based employment instead. However, to attract more young people to TVET-based education and employment, we need to deal with the social stigma attached to it, and at the same time we must work on modernising the training programmes.
The government also needs to re-evaluate the overall labour market scenario for the youth and take necessary steps to broaden the horizon of their employability. In this regard, greater collaborative efforts of industry and academia are required to deal with the issue of skill mismatch and due emphasis should be given to develop soft skills of students through a wide range of initiatives. In this connection, the importance of quality education focusing on basic language, analytical and computing skills, especially at the primary level, cannot be overemphasised.
Finally, with a view to facilitate the entrepreneurial activities of the young graduates, availability of cheaper sources of credit, market linkages, suitable digital infrastructure, budgetary incentives, etc must be ensured, and a favourable ecosystem for the graduates seeking self-employment activities must be built.
Dr Sayema Haque Bidisha is professor at the Department of Economics in the University of Dhaka and a research director at the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM).
Views expressed in this article are the authors' own.
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