The document discusses youth unemployment and proposes solutions using information and communication technologies (ICT). It argues that the skills demanded by today's labor market focus on complex problem solving and pattern matching rather than routine tasks now performed by computers. ICT can help youth develop contextual skills for continuous learning and collaboration to create new ideas through knowledge and experience sharing. The team believes ICT provides a way to leverage these skills and fight unemployment endogenously by addressing today's complex challenges.

1. Team: SMK
David Alenga and Shomi Kim

2. • Identifying the peculiarities of today’s environment because “You
cannot use yesterday’s tools to do today’s business and expect to
be in business tomorrow.”
• High youth unemployment is the result of a significant mismatch
between the skills offered by young people and the demands of the
labor market
• For this reason, we propose the endogenous development theory
pioneered by economist Paul Romer. Consistent with the theory, we
believe that the tools for fighting youth unemployment are
endogenous rather than exogenous factors. The human capital
component, backed by knowledge and innovation holds promise.
• Because the solution to youth unemployment is endogenously
engrained, our team believes that ICT offers the best way for us to
collaborate through extensive knowledge and experience sharing to
create new ideas to respond to our peculiar situations.

3.  We are not the “lost Generation:” We are the
“facebook generation.” The generation that can
use the power of ICT to embark on political
revolutions
 Conventional school-centered-education is no
path to employment but a dangerous slide down
the dead end jobs and the abyss of careerism. “It
emphasizes pre-digested information to build
fluency in routine problem solving, rather than
filtering data derived from experiences in
complex settings to develop skills in
sophisticated problem solving.”

4.  The Fordist-Taylorist development model of
mass production and manufacturing backed by
the scientific application of scientific
management of masses of people no longer
holds true for the 21st century
 Economists Richard Murnane and Frank Levy
blame educational systems that prepares people
for a labor market that operated on routine
cognitive work and routine manual labor--the
type that has now been taken over by computers.
The new source of employment is “expert
thinking or complex communication—tasks that
computers cannot do.”

5.  They say “expert thinking involves effective
pattern matching based on detailed
knowledge; and metacognition, the set of
skills used by the stumped expert to decide
when to give up on one strategy and what to
try next.”
 Youth unemployment is not the result of the
global recession but because of the absence
of the skills required to be economically
active in this generation

6.  A distinction has to be made between
“contextual skills” and “perennial skills.” The
labor market of the 21st century requires the
former and less of the latter.
 Contextual skills refer to developing the
required ways to respond to uncertain and
rapidly evolving challenges in the real world.
 Knowledge and continuous learning are the
wheels upon which the contextual skills roll.

7.  Contextual skills comes down to information
literacy, the type that will build the capacity
of the individual to be able to use technology
to mine information in order to construct
knowledge, inspire creative thinking leading
to creative product and service creation.
 The emphasis here is not on the proficiency
of the technology itself but the intellectual
activities that a person or group of persons
are able to do with ICT.

8.  ICT offers the chance for the continuous learning
because ICT powered social networking
platforms are the places where young people
connect with each other, discuss issues as it
pertains to their unique conditions, share
experiences that can potentially lead to the
creation of new ideas.
 We caution against the tendency to unilaterally
plunge into self-employment because one feels
the need to be employed. Self-employment
should be driven by the ability to offer a creative
idea to address real world challenges.

9.  Folks must leverage the power of ICT to bring
about the kind of impact of the Arab Spring.
We hasten to offer specifics, because like the
rest of the young people out there, the fight
needs to be fought and it must start from
somewhere that’s why ICT enables us to pull
down the barricades of time and space
through collaborative troubleshooting.

10.  The challenges of our times is that problems
are rarely clearly defined so we need to
collaborate via information sharing in ways
that will ensure that we confront the complex
and uncertain realities that we have to deal
with, such as those pertaining to the abstract
elements that constructs the
political, economic and social environments
we live in.
 Like Hyundai Motors, our team believes that
“New Thinking” brings about “New
Possibilities.”