Deadline: 5th of September 2020

POLICY RESEARCH OFFICER 

What’s The Prospect?

As a think tank for youth, by youth, the European Student Think Tank (EST) occupies a unique position: It informs its young audience about European affairs and represents the youth at the European Union level. Through its dedicated Working Group, the think tank acts as European students’ official voice at the Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth, led by the International Labour Organization since 2016. This United Nations platform brings together various stakeholders, including youth organizations, in the fight for quality work for the young and aims to catalyseaction towards the 2030 Agenda. For that purpose, the EST Working Group liaises with the European Commission, the European Parliament, and a number of platforms and organizations. In 2018/19, the project mobilized students from the London School of Economics, Bonn, Cambridge, Bologna, Leiden, and Oxford. In September 2020, the project enters a new cycle, running until December 2020. 

What’s My Role?

As member of the Working Group in 2020/21, your main task will be to conduct research on your selected subtopic of decent jobs for youth and to create low-threshold knowledge products, as previously in July 2020. 

Specifically for this year, we would like to focus our research focus on the different dimensions related to employment that were affected by the consequences of COVID-19. Many challenges aroused and a new smart working dimension emerged during the past months. Something we think it is very valuable to analyse under different perspectives and perhaps an occasion to find strong points (based on data analysis) on which to influence future youth employment policies from the EU commission. The dimensions affected by the global pandemic and identified until now in collaboration with the European Youth Forum and the International Labour Organization are: 

  1. Gender and youth (how this crisis affected different groups of society?)
  2. Education (how students and schools needed to adapt, with which academic results?) 
  3. Work environment (how companies and employees adopted smart working policies, with which effects, which challenges and problems ahead?) 
  4. Rural and urban environment (how ecosystem services in both environments needed to adapt? What was the effect on the environment?)
  5. Sustainability (COVID-19 is an occasion to rethink how we approach sustainability. How government institutions, the private sector, civil society and academia are interpreting and implementing sustainability policies, with which effects on youth employment?)
  6. Mental health ( the lockdown had a big impact on people’s and youth’s mental health as well as giving the occasion to reconsider our own health dimension with consequences on the overall quality of life. Which have been the positive and negative side of it and what to do in regards?)

Additionally, a range of opportunities to support youth workshops, participate in debates, webinars, interact with policy-makers, and attend conferences will open up from this platform. In particular, attending the European Youth Event in May 2021 to support EST’s planned workshops will be a unique way to get involved and is key to your contribution. On top of your substantive insights into employment and social affairs in Europe, this offers you a chance to enter a wide-ranging network of engaged students and to acquire key professional skills in drafting/editing/publishing, analysis, and project management. As a student-run group, we coordinate online and put great emphasis on granting volunteers space for their primary responsibilities at university and work. You should expect to commit an average of 2-3 hours per week to this extra-curricular project, which will adapt to your own schedule and the specific phase of the project. 

What’s EST Looking For?

To best support our Working Group and benefit most from the experience yourself, you should:

  • Be enrolled in a degree in social sciences or humanities (Bachelor, Master or PhD level) or work at entry level in such fields.
  • Be familiar with quantitative and qualitative data analysis related to the above described dimensions.
  • Have a strong interest in research and policy, with a particular emphasis on the European Union;
  •  Ideally contribute with some practical insights from areas of employment and social affairs, quality of life and public health.
  • Bring the motivation and time to stay committed for the full project cycle (09/2020 to 12/2020).

What’s Next?

If we have sparked your interest and you’d be a good fit, apply by the 5 of September 2020 with: 

  • your CV;
  • a Cover Letter of max. 800 words, outlining which dimensions you would like to work on between the ones already identified and whether you’d like to propose a new one. 

Please write to Gianluca Tomasello, our Head of Working Group, at youthemployment@esthinktank.com. 

We look forward to receiving your application!