Navigating Precarity in School-to-Work Transitions: The Experiences of Working-Class Youth in Indonesia

Over the last decades, the way young people move from school to work has changed significantly. Education no longer guarantees a pathway to employment. In Indonesia, despite the fact that today the younger generation has a higher education level than their parents, the country’s youth unemployment rate is extremely high. By engaging critically with Bourdieusian framework, my research attempts to understand how youth from low-income families navigate their post-school aspirations. My PhD project focuses on vocational graduates in Indonesia. They are not only dominated by youth from low-income family, but they are also the largest unemployed group in Indonesia, making them an appropriate case to study how young people respond to disjuncture between schooling and employment. Fieldwork for this project was done in the first semester of 2024. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 vocational graduates, aged between 20-25. Most of my participants work in service-oriented occupations with precarious working conditions (short-term contract, low salary, long working hours), while some of them are unemployed. Not only is my project useful to unpack the struggle and strategies young people use to navigate the rapid change in their transitions, but also to give insights on how they make sense of their experiences within the context of a disconnect between their vocational degree and employment experiences (career mismatch). Furthermore, a case study of vocational graduates in a Global South will allow me to bring Southern perspectives to existing debates in youth sociology about navigating social reproduction in the face of social change.