The European Student Think Tank (EST), a Europe-wide youth network, strives to empower the young by giving them a voice in today’s changing world of work. Bringing together academic expertise from complementary disciplines, its dedicated Working Group on Youth Employment commits to develop accessible and low-threshold knowledge products and to disseminate them to organizations and platforms in Europe. As a think tank by the youth for the youth, the EST capitalizes on its overarching structure, institutional network, and unique position between students and policy-oriented research to inform youth participation and support young people’s independence in working life.

Today’s rapid societal change and technological innovation are, despite their potential, accompanied by a rising sense of insecurity amongst the young. It can be a feeling of unwanted passivity towards the future. A future that is indeed shaped by complex and interrelated influences. Against this backdrop, the European Student Think Tank (EST) commits to support Europe’s youth through its dedicated Working Group on Youth Employment. Coordinating online from across the continent, the project synergizes expertise of early-career researchers from different disciplines and brings together academic resources from the University of Oxford, University of Bonn, University of Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. In its first project cycle 2018/19, the Working Group will create low-threshold knowledge products and disseminate them through the EST’s institutional network to partnering platforms and organizations, which hold participatory events and educational workshops on a regular basis. In an initial wave of publications in March 2019, the think tank will release Briefs on youth employment covering subtopics, such as gender inequality, youth and unions, technological change, social mobility, and atypical work. In August-September 2019, a second wave will engage in cross-cutting and solution-oriented investigation. The EST’s project strives to foster independent decision-making in professional life and to equip the young with an evidence base, while taking a representing and advocating role on the European level in support of the next generation’s case for decent jobs.

European Student Think Tank