청소년노동과 청소년정책의 방향

Future Directions of Youth Labor and Youth Policy

Recently, labor market participation and competency development of youth has become a social hot issue. However, youth labor policy has been neglected in the national youth policy. The purposes of this article are to emphasize the importance of the youth labor policy and to suggest the directions of the national youth policy. There are two kinds of tasks related to the youth labor policy. One is concerned with how to develop the vocational competency of youth effectively. The other is concerned with how to increase the employment of youth. To solve these tasks, first of all youth labor should be treated as a core agenda of the youth policy. Second, youth activity programs should focus on the development of vocational competency. Third, many youth activity programs, which are significant to upgrade the basic vocational competency for youth, should be developed and executed. Fourth, the role of youth leaders should be professionalized as an expert for competency reinforcement. Besides, it requires various political and administrative efforts such as launching the project to strengthen youth's vocational competency, job experience programs, integration of schools of after-school into academies of after-school, developing the vocational training programs for the disadvantaged, and organizing the supporters to promote overseas employment of youth.