Job seeker Michaela Drahovzalová says employers are looking for candidates with more experience.

In a job market crippled by high unemployment, young Czechs find their academic achievements mean less and experience means more.

By Tiffany Lo

Michaela Drahovzalová attended a prestigious economics high school, has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Charles University in Prague, and is currently finishing a second degree in Russian and Lithuanian language studies. For six years now, however, the 27-year-old student has been struggling to find a job.

Her frustration is apparent as she ponders what she did wrong. “Maybe if I were out of high school now, I would choose something else. Maybe economics. It would be more practical to go to an economics university,” she says.

Drahovzalová echoes the sentiments felt by frustrated university graduates throughout her country. In the Czech Republic unemployment among young people aged 15–24 has nearly doubled in the past year — from 10.8% in November 2008 to 20.4% in November 2009.

The Czech Republic is feeling the reverberations of the global recession and joins other EU countries suffering the same problem. According to European statistics agency Eurostat, youth unemployment in the European Union has surged from 16.6% to 21.4% in just a year. Spain has the highest youth unemployment rate, 43.8%. Latvia is a close second at 36.3%.

Jana Říhová, a spokeswoman for the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, attributes growing unemployment among young Czechs to the “overall economic situation.” The Czech labor market has begun to mirror what markets worldwide have been experiencing since late 2008.

Though youth unemployment in the Czech Republic is usually lower than in most EU countries, it is still more than twice the overall unemployment rate in the country.

Jan Červenka, an analyst at the Sociological Institute of the Academy of Sciences, says the education system is contributing to the problem. “Changes in the market happen much faster than changes in the education structure,” he said in an interview with The Prague Post. As more and more Czechs graduate from university, the value of their degrees falls. Young people are desperate to add experience to their résumé as a way to stand out in the pool of applicants.

“Now, it is very important to write on your CV that you have internships, volunteer experience, or study abroad. But in my time, it was all studying,” Drahovzalová says, adding that she is looking at jobs in the non-profit sector and internships abroad.

Conditions abroad are not necessarily better. In an interview with AFP, Spanish Employment Minister Celestino Corbacho said the high rate of youth unemployment was due to short-term contracts that bind young people to jobs where employers pay fewer benefits. When recession strikes, this allows employers to dispose of them more easily.

Dunja Potočnik, who works in youth policy in Croatia, believes this also extends to the problem of youth unemployment in the Czech Republic. “Youth unemployment always increases in a crisis,” she says. “The youngest are the least protected, and for employers, it’s easier to terminate jobs of the youngest.”

To counter the growing surge of bewildered applicants left with university degrees and not much more, the European Commission stated plans to enact the EU Youth Strategy 2010–18. The plan aims to integrate younger workers in a market where their labor is valued as much as that of older, more experienced workers.

Researcher Červenka sees the “apparent devaluation of academic degrees in the last four or five years as a big problem in the Czech Republic.” The number of bachelor degree graduates has quadrupled since five years ago, he says, making it harder for those who have only completed high school to find jobs. Červenka says this group comprises the biggest entity in the umbrella of youth unemployment.

“Recent data show that some 40,000 secondary-school leavers are unemployed, and the predictions of future are rather pessimistic,” Červenka says. As more students obtain graduate degrees, experience becomes a bigger factor in who get hired.

Jan Mitiska, a 20-year-old Czech, knows what it is like to face the job market without a university degree. He dropped out of the University of Economics after only one semester and has been bouncing from job to job ever since.

The Czech Labor Code, passed in 2006, states that a part-time worker can work for a company for no more than 150 hours a year.

“It is easy to obtain part-time jobs,” Mitiska says. “It is much more difficult to keep them.”

When he does find part-time work, it is often unappealing. He recalls his own stint as a security guard. “People wanted a job and applied but when they realized it was guarding outside in the cold, no one wanted the job, even though it wasn’t difficult. You walk for seven hours outside. It’s just walking. Anybody in elementary school can do it,” he says.

Emil Brejnik, manager of First Czech Recruitment, looks to place job seekers with employers. “Companies are asking for applicants whose expectations are not high,” he says.