Scotland is not preparing or equipping young people for the world of work, according to a commission led by one of the country's top businessmen.
Sir Ian Wood's commission said youth employment must be cut by almost half by 2020 to boost economic growth.
Schools and employers must systematically work together to provide education that will lead successfully to employment, it said.
Nearly a fifth (18.8%) of young people are unemployed, more than double the average working age population and higher than many other European countries.
Scotland should bring its youth employment down below 30,000 in line with the five best European countries by 2020, the commission said.
It stated: "We are simply not preparing or equipping these young people for the world of work.
"There must be much more focus on providing them with the skills, qualifications and vocational pathways that will lead directly to employment opportunities.
"It is also clear that employers have lost the habit of employing young people. Only 29% of employers recruit young people from education and only 13% of employers take on apprentices.
"Business and industry must be encouraged to work together with education and young people, and vice versa, to establish pro-active and engaged relationships which will benefit both young people and employers."
Youth Employment Secretary Angela Constance said Sir Ian had set out "a challenging programme to transform the way we work with young people, employers, schools and colleges".
"Our ambitions to see significant improvements in our youth employment numbers go beyond a return to pre-recession levels when, during a period of growth, youth employment stood at 7.7 percentage points above that of the general population," she said.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article