19. How many recent IVET graduates are in employment?

IVET can facilitate the transition from education to work and contribute to lowering youth unemployment.  

The indicator below is defined as the employment rate of young people aged 20 to 34 who have a vocational qualification at ISCED 3-4 one to three years before the survey as their highest level of education attainment and who are no longer in education and training (either formal or non-formal). In the following sections compare the indicator with the corresponding rates for medium level graduates from general education. In the 2020 policy cycle, a quantitative target has been set for this indicator.  

Employment rate for recent IVET graduates (20–34-year-olds) 

Source : Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS).

Key points

In 2020, in the EU, the average employment rate for recent IVET graduates with a medium level of education (ISCED 3-4), and no longer in (formal or non-formal) education, was 75.7%. Germany (91%) and Malta (89.5%) had the highest employment rates for 20- to 34-year-old IVET recent graduates and Greece (43.7%) and Spain (50.3%) the lowest. Between 2015 and 2020, in the EU overall, the indicator increased by 3.4 percentage points. The largest increase was in Croatia (+27.0%), followed by Italy (+10.6%), with  substantial falls registered in Lithuania (-18.8 percentage points) and Cyprus (-11.3%). 

A break in time series for data for 2020 for Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Poland, and Sweden means that they cannot be reliably compared with data for 2015. Data for Luxembourg are not available due to low reliability. 

Among the non-EU countries for which there are data, Norway and Switzerland had rates of respectively 86.9% and 86.4% in 2020. These were higher than the EU average. The employment rate in Turkey and North Macedonia were, in contrast, much lower than the EU average (resp. 47.9% and 49.1%). 

Table 19. Employment rate for recent IVET graduates (20–34-year-olds) 

Source: Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS) Notes: (b) ‘break in time series’; (p) ‘provisional’; (u) ‘unreliable’, data are not presented when they are not available and/or do not support sufficiently reliable comparisons across countries or over time.