Bridges to the Future Creative Content Competition

In 2020, the ASEAN Foundation launched a new programme entitled Bridges to the Future: ASEAN Youth Employment in collaboration with Plan International and with the support of Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, which aims to support ASEAN youth in not only acquiring the necessary 21st-century skills to (re)enter the workforce but also building a more sustainable and secure economy post-pandemic.

The programme will become a host to market-driven vocational training and job-matching sessions that targets vulnerable young people in the region. This is reflected by the fact that youth have increasingly been more prone to be unemployed compared to adults in light of the pandemic. With the outbreak of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, the situation has been further exacerbated as young workers suffered a disproportionate amount of job losses. Young people across Southeast Asia such as in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam accounted for as much as 45% of job losses at the height of the pandemic in 20201.

On 17th of June 2022, the ASEAN Foundation launched the research report entitled Mind the Gap: Mapping Youth Skills for the Future in ASEAN report. The Foundation conducted the research from March 2021 until May 2022 on Youth Job Market and Skills Demand Study in 10 ASEAN Member States (AMS), it comprised several key stages such as data collection through surveys, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews with key informants in the region. The study process conducted by the ASEAN Foundation aims to analyse and produce a comprehensive landscape of youth employability in the region, focusing on the vulnerable youth workers in the post-pandemic. The research intends to map out the future skills required by underserved youth across 10 countries in the ASEAN region. This research focuses to capture three main points namely i) the employability landscape of the youth aged 18-29 in ASEAN in pandemic and post-pandemic scene, ii) the most demanded skills in the job market, and iii) the barriers for underserved youth to enter the job market.

The findings from the report aim to not only inform private entities and policymakers across the region but also to engage with young people from 10 AMS, within the discussion of youth employment in ASEAN. As part of ASEAN Foundation’s continuous initiative to disseminate the findings from the research and in conjunction with the celebration of World Youth Skills day 2022 and to continue to promote key elements of the Bridges to the Future: ASEAN Youth Employment programme, we are calling youth across the region to join the ASEAN Youth Creative Content Competition.

Objectives, target, & format

We invite ASEAN youth to join the creative content competition to help us disseminate the findings from the Mind the Gap: Mapping Youth Skills for the Future in ASEAN Report in a youthful and creative way. Youth can submit their creative content through Instagram within the period of 11-31 July 2022.

Beyond serving the purpose of engaging more ASEAN youth in this programme, there are two main objectives as below:

To raise awareness and improve knowledge of ASEAN youth on the current trend of the job market and skill demand by encouraging them to explore the findings from Mind the Gap: Mapping Youth Skills for the Future in ASEAN report, where the research itself can be one of the main sources of the creative content youth will develop

To invite ASEAN youth to engage in discussion around youth employment in the region and supporting the recovery process in the region, particularly for the vulnerable job seekers, through the social media platform

The target participants of this campaign are youth and the general public in ASEAN.  The creative content competition will be conducted with the following details:

Competition period: 11 – 31 July 2022

Platform: Instagram

Awards:-

The winners will be three selected works by the jury that will win the total prize of USD 1,000