Evaluation: Your Job Your Way

The Centre for Social Impact UNSW partnered with yourtown to evaluate the pilot program your job your way, which aims to transition long-term unemployed young people to sustainable employment. While the pilot ceased at all sites on 30 June 2020, the program was funded until 30 June 2021.

Young people are three times more likely than adults to be unemployed and the proportion of long-term unemployed youth (15-24 year-olds) has been on the rise in the past few decades.

Long-term unemployed young people face a range of vocational and non-vocational barriers to attaining and maintaining employment and require a specific suite of interventions and intensive support to make a sustainable transition to employment, however historically, employment assistance programs have had modest impacts with little or no benefit to young people.

Your job your way is a 24-month pilot program designed to complement job active services. Rolled out at three sites in socio-economically disadvantaged areas across South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, it targets young people aged 15-24 years who have been unemployed for over 52 weeks and are at high risk of social exclusion and permanent detachment from the labour market.

The outcomes, challenges, and successes of implementing this program over two years, including the obstacles presented by Australia’s 2019 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic, are discussed in this report.

Through comparison with job active outcomes, and using evaluation data, this final evaluation report also describes and examines vocational and non-vocational outcomes, and provides a cost-effectiveness analysis to help provide an evidence base to support advocacy efforts for a more intensive, client-centred response to long-term youth unemployment.