It looks like moving home to your parent’s house after college may not be a dead-end. It may even jump-start your career. You just have to put up with your dad... being your boss.

Youth unemployment is dismal around the world (except in Germany) and predicted to flat-line before it goes down. It’s highest for young people in Spain and Greece, where over 50 percent of young people are unemployed.

In America, college grads, frustrated with the labor market, are starting franchises in partnership with their parents. Rick Bisio told the New York Times that 10 to 20 percent of the franchisees he works with as a franchise consultant, are parent-child pairs. And the number is rising. 

Whether parents have been laid-off, are looking for a late-career change or want to grow their existing companies, parents are fronting the money to go into business with their kids.

The division of labor usually breaks down like it did for the Leonard family, that started a cell-phone repair franchise:

His wife, Paula, will run the front desk, Mr. Leonard said, while his older son, Russell, 29, will be responsible for marketing; his younger son, Philip, 27, for technology; and his daughter, Carolyn, 24, for social media.

Sure, returning home may not the pinnacle of a 22-year-old’s ambitious future, but it’s one way to get around the youth job market standstill. That is, if your parents are loaded.

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Teen employment in the U.S. is near historic lows, yet companies report jobs going unfilled because they can’t find qualified workers. So how do we solve the problem?

Policymakers, employers and academics all say this issue is key to addressing America’s economic future. The New Options Project Youth Advisers are hosting a series of live chats, inviting young people to join conversations about how best to prepare youth for the jobs of tomorrow.

Have ideas? Join us as we talk about the problem, and possible solutions.

Reporting by Joy White

The city of Chicago saw its deadliest January in over a decade in 2013, according to the Associated Press, amassing over 40 homicides. In response to the recent rash of killings, Mariame Kaba from Project Nia launched a project called Uproar Chicago. The goal? A community-curated audio collage about gun violence.

The project works like this: anyone can call the toll free number and leave a one-sentence voicemail message about their thoughts or feelings about gun violence in Chicago. The voicemails will be pieced together into a 3-5 minute collage.

Martin Macias, 23, is a student at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and is one of the developers of this project. But he also participated. He left a voicemail message about his own experience with gun violence.

“When I was younger, I was at my school with my dad, and someone pulled up with a gun and fired into a crowd of people on the playground,” said Macias. “Everyone was scared. It made me afraid of my community and it made me hate my community. Now after all these years, I really love my community. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he said.

 Imagine a world where you can graduate from school, by working. A world where at the end of every week, students get a paycheck and school credits. At my high school in Castro Valley, we have that opportunity, but why shouldn’t everybody?

One day, me and my friends were standing around, casually talking during our lunch period, and the question arose “What do you want to do when you grow up?” The unanimous response was a confused, “I don’t know.” At our age, it seems normal not to know what to do with your life. But it shouldn’t be. We need to leave school at the end of our four years having some idea of where our lives are headed, and the school itself should help with that. I don’t want to finish my first semester in law school, already thousands of dollars in debt, and then decide to be a masseuse instead.

Young Invincibles, an advocacy organization that focuses on issues pertaining to 18 - 34 year olds, released a gloomy jobs report about the state of employment for young Americans.

According to the report, there are 2.7 million fewer jobs for 16 - 24 year olds than there were before the recession.

In addition, the recovery trend for young people seems to be slowing down. Check out what the report has to say:

After the 1981 recession, young people made a relatively speedy recovery, returning to their pre-recession unemployment rate in less than three years. It took significantly longer after the 1990 recession; more than seven years passed before young people regained their pre-recession unemployment rate. The youth labor market never fully recovered from the 2001 dot-com crash. And four and one half years after the Great Recession hit in 2007, the youth unemployment rate is 141 percent of where it was in 2007.

Youth Radio's "Job Chronicles" video series is a production of our New Options Desk, which tracks innovative career pathways for young adults. "Job Chronicles" tells stories of young adults looking for jobs, with a comedic spin. In our second episode, Jesus goes in for a job interview wearing street clothes. Let's see if he gets the job...

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Youth Radio's "Job Chronicles" video series is a production of our New Options Desk, which tracks innovative career pathways for young adults. "Job Chronicles" tells stories of young adults looking for jobs, with a comedic spin. In our first episode, Demarcus goes in for a job interview with a bad attitude. Let's see if he gets the job...

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Unemployment in the nation remains high -- around 8.2 percent. But employers talk about a “skills gap” that keeps them from hiring the 25 million people in America looking for jobs, meaning the applicant pool isn’t qualified to fill the open positions.

Maybe it’s because workplace skills are rapidly changing with new technology, or maybe it’s that employers can be picky in such a saturated market.

According the US Department of Education, New Mexico ranks last in the country in high school completion rates. Major employers in that state complain of difficulty finding qualified job applicants. But a new statewide effort piloted by Santa Fe based Innovate+Educate is de-emphasizing the high school diploma in favor of a standardized test that many believe will make it easier to hire the right people. 

The City of Albuquerque is an early adopter. Mike Smith, director of Albuquerque's Public Service University, a city office designed to change the way hirning and promotions happen within the city, calls it a win-win for employers and job seekers. "There are people out there that want to enter into the workforce, but because they don’t have their GED or they don’t have their high school diploma, they’re not working."

The City of Albuquerque employs nearly seven thousand people, making it one of the largest employers in the state. Smith says there are 275 bus drivers, 200 garbage collectors, and 78 early head start teaching assistants, all positions that used to require a high school diploma and soon will be available to applicants who achieve benchmark scores on a test-- the WorkKeys Assessment. It’s made by the ACT company, the same people who make the college readiness exam, except WorkKeys doesn’t test algebra or even a person’s knowledge base. Instead it uses real world scenarios to measure job readiness.

This story originally aired on NPR's Morning Edition.

By Nishat Kurwa

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When Shannon Mills left her job as the director of a nonprofit in Berkeley, California about five months ago, she didn't know what her next job would be. After freelancing for awhile, she decided to hunt for something more permanent.

"I started putting in applications and you know how the job market is ...it was just crickets on the other end. People weren’t even telling me thank you for applying," she said. That routine can become demoralizing. Mills switched up her strategy, migrating her search for work to TaskRabbit.com.

TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque conceived of this online marketplace in 2008 after the stock market had crashed, and the wave of layoffs was creeping. "It’s really about empowering people in a service networking marketplace to connect and help each other out," she said.

Many of the site’s early “Rabbits” were unemployed people looking to tide themselves over until they found a stable job in their field. More recently, the ranks have been plumped up by a lot of full-time moms, who take on Tasks like a grocery run at Costco.

"They’re out running their own errands anyway," explained Busque. "It may be more difficult for young professionals that live in the city with no car. Our most popular tasks are in the category of house chores, grocery deliveries, food deliveries. One thing that did really surprise me is Ikea furniture assembly...there’s people out there that are experts at doing this."

Using TaskRabbit, you can outsource everything from fixing a doorjam to penning a love letter.The person doing the hiring posts a task with a suggested fee, and then qualified TaskRabbits can counter bid. Busque says if a TaskRabbit has diverse skills, they could end up getting two to three Tasks, and up to eight hours of work, a day.

According to Gallup, the U.S. under-employment rate is hovering at 19 percent. New apps and services that help people supplement their incomes are taking off in cities around the country. Until TaskRabbit, Craigslist was the go-to free online destination to find casual work. But TaskRabbit’s strapping infrastructure of profiles, bidding, and reviews makes Craigslist’s “Gig” category look a bit quaint. And crucially, TaskRabbit has one-upped Craigslist on the trust factor.