Increasing young people's employability and access to the labour market is the main objective of 'Youth on the Move', EU's initiative launched on 15 September 2010. 'Youth on the Move' is a new flagship initiative part of the Europe 2020 strategy which proposes 28 key actions aimed at making education and training more relevant to young people's needs and encouraging more of them to take advantage of EU grants to study or train in another country.

Youth on the Move aims to extend opportunities for learning mobility to all young people in Europe by 2020. The initiative will be instrumental in achieving the Europe 2020 headline targets of reducing the share of early school leavers from 15% to 10% and increasing the share of young people with tertiary education or equivalent from 31% to at least 40% by 2020.

Youth on the Move actions will also help Member States reach the headline EU target for 75% employment over the next ten years by helping to ensure that young people have the right skills for the jobs of tomorrow. Commission studies show that 35% of new jobs will require high-level qualifications by 2020 and that 50% will require medium-level qualifications.

Youth on the Move Top 10 actions

1. Launch of a dedicated Youth on the Move website, which will provide a single point of access to information about opportunities to study or gain work experience abroad, including advice about EU grants and individual rights. This will build on existing initiatives such as the Portal on Learning Opportunities throughout the European Space (PLOTEUS).
2. A pilot project "Your first EURES job" will provide advice, job search and financial support to young jobseekers who want to work abroad and to companies - particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. The project will be managed by EURES, the network of European Public Employment Services, and will be operational in 2011.
3. A mobility scoreboard will benchmark and measure progress in removing legal and technical obstacles to learning mobility.
4. The Commission is examining, in cooperation with the European Investment Bank, the creation of a European student lending facility to support students who wish to study or train abroad.
5. It will publish the findings of a study to test the feasibility of a multi-dimensional global university ranking system, to provide a more complete and realistic picture of higher education performance than existing rankings.
6. It also plans to develop a Youth on the Move card, which would provide benefits and discounts for young people.
7. A new European Vacancy Monitor will provide an intelligence system on labour market demand across Europe for jobseekers and employment advisors. The launch is planned later this year.
8. The Commission's new European Progress Micro-finance Facility will provide financial support to help young entrepreneurs set up or develop their businesses.
9. It will encourage Member States to introduce a youth guarantee to ensure all young people are in a job, training or work experience within six months of leaving school.
10. The Commission will propose a European skills passport, based on Europass (European online CV), to allow skills to be recorded in a transparent and comparable way. Launch: Autumn 2011.

Further to the launch of the Youth on Move initiative, the Commission has also launched a public consultation on the future of its mobility programmes for post 2013. The Commission already has a long tradition of supporting mobility through the grants it provides from Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, Grundtvig and Marie Curie.