The Psychology of Work and Organisations has a long research tradition into the problem of young people's employability, as well as the career that young people follow in the labour market. Among other topics, attention has been paid to career guidance prior to entering the labour market, vocational guidance when choosing training or integration itineraries, the qualifications and personal competences of young people, the difficulties and adaptation process of young people who have recently entered the labour market, as well as the consequences that a greater or lesser adjustment between the expectations and qualifications of young people and the labour demands and experiences lived during integration have on various aspects (job satisfaction, expectations for the future, work motivation, career development, etc.).
Likewise, the profound changes that the world of work and organisations have undergone in recent decades have had a major influence on the integration of young people into the labour market and their consequences on a large number of psychosocial variables (personal adjustment, psychological well-being, job insecurity, stress, etc.).
Furthermore, the labour force participation and employment rates of young people have recurrently shown significantly worse data than those of other groups, in different contexts and for many years now, regardless of fluctuations depending on the economic situation. The psychology of work and organisations has focused on the effects of youth unemployment, job discontinuity and difficulties in finding employment, as well as on variables related to job search, employability and psychosocial and environmental characteristics that can favour better labour market integration and reduce the adverse effects of situations such as unemployment, over-qualification or the mismatch between job expectations and job demands.
In this line, IDOCAL has participated in numerous studies and projects on this subject, from studies on the meaning of work and the socialisation of young people (WOSY Project, carried out from the end of the 1980s), to the collaboration with different projects developed in OPAL, and the participation in the Observatory for Young People’s Labour Market Integration (IVIE-Bancaja), which carried out six waves of triannual national surveys from 1996 to 2011.
This collaboration has produced numerous publications on the problems of young people’s labour integration: the work values and expectations of young people in the period of their entry into the labour market, the different pathways of integration that young people follow, the degree of psychosocial adjustment that results after said integration, the meaning that young people attach to work in the context of their lives and their conception of it, as well as its evolution over time, the flexibility of young people in entering the labour market, over-qualification, job insecurity, the influence of the labour market situation and unemployment rates on young people's psychological well-being and their perceptions of employability, their coping mechanisms in such situations, as well as the psychological variables that favour work motivation and job search, such as self-efficacy, proactivity or self-regulation.
