Abstract:

The difficulties in finding regular and stable employment and the resulting social consequences have reached worrying dimensions in recent years. The growing demand for education and the hierarchy and regulation of employment continue to show increasingly obvious difficulties in absorbing a growing skilled workforce. In this context, the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic has brought new challenges worldwide: the establishment of telework and the intense decline in economic activity were some of the most evident cross-cutting changes, with direct consequences for the emergence of new forms and policies to support the employment.

In this context, we try, here, to reflect how young graduates of polytechnic higher education in Portugal project the future employment risks, particularly in terms of unemployment, new forms and conditions of the exercise of work, adaptations and changes in terms of content, contracts and timetables, keeping in mind their gender, age, academic training areas. This knowledge is crucial to the content and pedagogies adaption in academia to help develop the needed competences of the future work labour force. It will also be possible to observe how the entrepreneurial skills or the entrepreneurship path is in their future.

Keywords:

Work risks, youth graduates, polytechnic higher education, COVID-19.