Youth employment

Sustainability is more than reducing your company's CO2 footprint and doing your best to run and produce sustainable or carbon-neutral businesses and products. That is of course part of it, naturally, but there are other aspects too. Youth employment, for example, or unemployment among young people and recent graduates. On this page we want to write a little more about what the issues in this area are, why it is a problem, how the UN and other companies approach it, and how Kastbergs approaches the subject.

What are the issues?

This question has many aspects, and so that it is not just our own subjective opinion, we would like to refer to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Let us first understand what the relevant goals for youth employment are about. Below you will see some of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals that relate to youth employment.

4.4: By 2030, increase the percentage of youth and adults who have relevant skills, both technical and vocational:

8.5: By 2030, achieve full and productive employment and decent work, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value.

8.6: By 2020, significantly reduce the share of young people who are not in employment, education or training.

There are many challenges in the field of youth employment. But if we generalise a little, these challenges largely come down to the fact that a large share of young people around the world are outside of work, education and training or apprenticeships. In Northern Europe, the share of young people who are not in education, employment or training or an internship is 11%, so this is a very big problem. Furthermore, globally it takes young people 13.8 months on average to find a job after completing their education. This tells a story of a very large gap between what is in demand in the business world and the vocational and technical skills many recent graduates have acquired. It is also about making sure that a larger share of these young people will have relevant technical and vocational skills in the future. Not least, it is about everyone having equal opportunities and being able to have decent work. Having a job in itself is not the same as having decent work. It also means proper, safe and secure working conditions, as well as a decent and fair wage.

What are other companies doing?

There are many different approaches to these problems, and the companies with the greatest opportunity to make a difference are of course the large international companies with many employees and plenty of resources. There are many examples of large international companies that invest substantial resources in a variety of initiatives. One example is large food producers that encourage young people to make farming their livelihood, help them run their farms as real businesses, and teach them to use regenerative farming methods in their production. It could also be innovation programmes, where young entrepreneurs receive help taking their innovations all the way from the idea stage to implementation. There are also more general programmes that help young people develop job-relevant abilities and vocational skills by offering jobs, internships and apprenticeships. Large companies have the resources to help a great many young people, and fortunately many of them invest heavily in this. What is the reason? They know that young people are the future and form the foundation for future growth.

Youth employment at Kastbergs

So what significance does the issue of youth employment have at Kastbergs?

At Kastbergs we are very aware of the issue, and we put real effort into having a culture within the company that welcomes young and newly qualified employees. For us, youth employment and having a culture that welcomes young people and recent graduates means that we are very happy to bring in young employees and give them a good, safe and secure place to work. At Kastbergs, young employees can get the time, space and, not least, guidance they need to develop both professionally and personally. An approach like this, where we are very happy to bring in young people, means that it is not always the people with the most work experience who walk through the door. In return, they are usually happy to get a decent job, eager to learn, perhaps bring a new perspective or approach, and, not least, bring courage and drive and are ready to work in an environment where things move fast.

At Kastbergs, there must be room to welcome young employees and to give them the opportunity to develop, and we strive hard so that, if someone eventually leaves Kastbergs, they will hopefully have enjoyed going to work, taken a lot of relevant experience with them into the rest of their life, and developed both personally and professionally. We do not have the same resources as large international companies to set up extensive programmes and the like. What we can do is, exactly as described, offer the best possible working conditions, as well as advice, guidance and plenty of responsibility, so that we can all develop in the right direction. It may not make much difference in the big picture when a small company like Kastbergs does these things, but if all companies, public authorities and so on take their share of the responsibility, together we can get very far.

The young employees:

Read more here about how Thomas, one of our talented young employees and currently our marketing coordinator, experienced being welcomed by Kastbergs:

“I started at Kastbergs in December 2020, as a relatively recent graduate with a Master's in Business Economics (Cand.Merc.) and without a lot of experience. With a degree like mine, which is quite theoretical, you have a lot of knowledge about certain topics and theories within the commercial field, but it can be hard, when you finish your studies, to say exactly what it is you can actually help a company with beyond research or analysis, since there are not many practical tools in the programme. So practical experience has to come from student jobs during your studies. Which I of course also had. When I started at Kastbergs, it came with a bit of a compromise: I also had to help out on the production side at first, since it was still a small company, and there were neither the resources nor enough work for me to work on marketing full time. I was perhaps a little ambivalent about having to help out in production in the beginning, but I quickly found out that it was a good way for me to learn about our product, how we make it, and, not least, why our ice cream is SO GOOD. Because of this, I have a much more thorough understanding of our product's quality, and these experiences have definitely helped me in my work with marketing and selling the ice cream, as they have enabled me to talk about and describe the products in great depth. Perhaps just as importantly, it also meant that I got to know everyone in the company really well, which helped me feel very much at home socially. In my marketing work, I had, as mentioned, a lot of theory but had not worked much with it in practice. At Kastbergs I have been allowed to work on a very broad range of marketing activities, from social media, email marketing, website and SEO to planning trade fair activities and everything in between. It has been very educational, and I have received exactly the amount of responsibility and guidance I needed in order to develop. Today I think I have a really exciting job, where I mainly work with marketing, but I have been involved in all departments of the company and can, in principle, step in and help wherever it is needed. I find that exciting, since the tasks I meet in my everyday work are often very varied. Kastbergs can definitely be recommended as a workplace for young and newly qualified people like myself.”