Born and raised in Mongolia, a landlocked nation in Asia, I moved to the US to study business management for my undergraduate degree. Upon returning home, I got employed at a technology start-up company. It was a promising career, but an incident changed my outlook on society—my participation in the Young Leadership Program organized by a local NGO working for youth and community development. During the program, I worked with children with cancer, which showed me I was capable of contributing more to our society. This led me to eventually changing my job and starting to work for the youth at the organization.
In Mongolia, the overwhelming majority of its three million people are under the age of 35, so we are a nation of young people. However, much of the youth lack sustainable employment to support their livelihood. According to a UN report, the education-to-employment transition takes 2.9 years on average in my country.*9 Due to the long period of unemployment, many youths choose to go into informal employment even though they obtained a university degree. This issue is more serious in marginalized areas because of challenges like the lack of education and access to social services.
In 2017, I set out to solve this problem and designed the Sustainable Employment for Youth Program, where we teach participants employability skills such as resume writing and job interviewing, and also place them in internships matching their educational background and interests. Since we started, 95% of our participants have found sustainable jobs in their fields.
So, my goal is to scale up the program to help even more people arrive at the job of their dreams. And I dream of creating a more equitable world where all young people can build a successful career.
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