Young workers hav e hard time fi nding, keeping work: study
Jobs for many dropouts last less than a year
WASHINGTON — Young adults born in the early 1980s held an average of just over six jobs each from ages 18 through 26, a U. S. Labor Department survey recently revealed .
Since 1997, the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has been keeping tabs on about 9,000 young men and women born in the early 1980s, surveying their educational and workplace progress. The latest survey is from interviews conducted in 2011- 12.
According to the survey, more than two- thirds of the jobs held by high- school dropouts lasted less than a year.
Women in the study group overall were more educated than the men. Thirty- two per cent of the women earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to 24 per cent of the male participants. Overall, 70 per cent of the women had either some college or received a bachelor’s degree, compared to 61 per cent of the men.
In the survey, young adults born from 1980 to 1984 held an average of 6.2 jobs from ages 18 to 27 — 6.0 jobs for men and 6.3 for women.
The number of jobs held varied by educational levels more for women than for men. For men it ranged from 5.9 jobs for those with less than a highschool diploma to 6.0 jobs for those with a college bachelor’s degree or higher. For women, those with less than a highschool diploma held 4.9 jobs over the period while women with a bachelor’s degree or higher held 6.9 jobs.
The study included the period of the recession that ended in 2009. During that period, jobs across all age groups were lost and overall unemployment soared to 10 per cent. It was 6.7 per cent in February.