World Youth Skills Day 2020

Skills for a Resilient Youth in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond

The World Youth Skills Day 2020 took stock of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on skills development and explored how young people can respond to the economic crisis.

News | 20 July 2020
Beijing (ILO News) – World Youth Skills Day, observed annually on 15 July, celebrates the importance of equipping young people with skills for decent employment and entrepreneurship. The World Youth Skills Day 2020 took stock of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on skills development and explored how young people can respond to the economic crisis. The focus this year was to help young people be more resilient to changes caused by the current crisis and in the world of work in general.

The virtual event of this year’s World Youth Skills Day was co-organized by the Permanent Missions to the United Nations of Portugal and Sri Lanka, UNESCO, ILO and the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth. During the event, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder launched the ILO Toolkit for Quality Apprenticeships, Volume II for Practitioners, as well as announce the winner of the ILO Skills Challenge Innovation Call, a global competition to identify innovative approaches to address skills mismatch. The Director-General highlighted ILO’s commitment to a better future of work for youth. ‘We call for urgent, large scale and targeted skills - and employment policy responses to prevent the COVID-19 crisis from inflicting long-lasting damage to a generation of young people.’

The ILO Toolkit for Quality Apprenticeships, Volume II for practitioners offers comprehensive, practical guidance to developing and implementing apprenticeship programmes. The Toolkit combines diverse national good practices with ILO experience, it includes over 125 tools and guides from more than 40 countries and institutions worldwide. Each tool can be adapted to fit national and local contexts and applied in different countries. Besides apprenticeship programmes, this Toolkit can also be used for other TVET programmes. For example, it contains tools for identifying skills needs, preparing occupational profiles and curricula, and developing instructional and learning materials and post-training transitions and evaluations.

In China, ILO is collaborating with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, employers’ and workers’ organizations to promote quality apprenticeship and develop more responsive skill development systems. See more information from: Quality apprenticeship and lifelong learning in China.