The triennial cooperation project consists of a cooperation between IEFP and ISCTE, through the Youth Employment Observatory, to develop research studies on Youth Employment, Youth Unemployment, Youth Employment Policies, and Youth and the Labour Market. During the first triennium of the cooperation contract the following studies are being developed: profiles of youth unemployment (study 1); young people's perceptions on the services provided by IEFP (study 2); qualitative analysis of the profiles of youth unemployment (study 3); quality of youth employment (study 4).

The Youth Employment Observatory (OEJ) is part of the DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte (Centre for Studies on Socio-Economic Change and the Territory) and is funded by FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology. The OEJ aims to create a repository of content and research dedicated exclusively to the youth labour market, taking advantage of synergies and spaces for interaction between DINÂMIA'CET’s research projects dedicated to studying labour. (See “partnerships” for information on the research projects currently underway). The Observatory focuses on three areas of study - youth unemployment, quality of youth employment, and labour market policies directed at young labour market participants. The project's central objective is to produce publications that highly impact society, namely reports and policy briefs, and to provide regularly updated key data.

Are employers active players in the process of nurturing and driving skill supply by younger university graduates? And how do they interact with Universities in shaping graduates' skills? Firms rely upon timely availability of skills to compete and grow, while workers depend on their skills to access jobs and, more importantly, high quality jobs. The purpose of this research programme (RP) is to examine employers' strategies to access the skills they need by either recruiting skilled employees from the labour market (LM) or by training their internal labour force. This choice reflects the make-or-buy alternative typical of all production factors, yet the centrality of human resources and the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes of programmes targeted at their development turn this choice into a critical driver of firm survival. Due to the crucial roles played by graduates from higher education (HE) institutions in shaping growth and innovation processes, this RP focuses on HE under- and post-graduates. When do employers prefer ready-to-work over ready-to learn graduates? What individual characteristics encourage internal training? Which solutions may support university-to-work transitions and consequently reduce or avoid skill problems? The underlying assumption is that the match between skill demand and skill supply depends on the ability of HE institutions to provide students with appropriate skills but also on firms' human resource policies and practices. To account for the intertwined roles of HE institutions and employers this RP explores both anticipative and remedial strategies and pursues five specific goals: 1) identify the employability skills for younger HE graduates in national and international LMs; 2) examine firms' strategies to access and develop required skills; 3) explore employers' expectations from HE institutions; 4) explore how employers' skill policies affect job quality of younger graduates; and 5) explore the relationship between HE and firm...

This project addresses the transformations of the employment regime that took place in Portugal in the context of global economic restructuring of the last decades and its onsequences in respect to employment and work. The deleterious impacts on work of the growing internationalization of production and concomitant financialisation have been salient in a country vulnerable to delocalization of production, macroeconomic imbalances and indebtedness. These impacts reached their zenith with the Global Financial Crisis and ensuing "troika" financial bail-out in 2011. At the time a reconfiguration of employment regime aimed at internal devaluation was spelled out in the troika's Memoradum and implemented, affecting institutions and rules governing employment protection, working time arrangements, unemployment benefits and collective bargaining. Building on previous research that characterized the institutional reconfiguration associated with internal devaluation as a regressive one that amounted to a transfer of income from labor to capital and to a change of power resources unfavorable to organized labor, the project intends to broaden this research in two different ways. First, it extends the assessment of devaluation of work to key dimensions of the quality of employment and working conditions that might have been directly deteriorated as a result of the reconfiguration of employment regime (in particular wages, working time and job security). Second, by analyzing actors' strategies and power resources at national, sector, and company level it pin points long term consequences of internal devaluation its drivers, and means to counteract them. The project conjectures that the institutional reconfiguration of the Portuguese employment regime and internal devaluation may have accelerated a process of cumulative devaluation of work involving loss of competences and skills, investment retrenchment, increasing inequalities, and demographic decay, whose relations and drivers ...