Employability and Industrial Mutations

Conclusion

The temporality of academic research, its writing and publication contrasts with the temporality of economic, social or societal events. While we were organizing the research day on employability with our partner IPSI in December 2019, France was living to the rhythm of the Gilets jaunes protests and transport strikes. Nine months later, as we finalize this book, France and all other countries in the world are experiencing a crisis of unprecedented magnitude, sudden and lasting, health-related and economic. In this context, what sense do our reflections and the contributions gathered here make about employability issues? How can we distinguish between the exceptional nature of this crisis and its inevitably systemic and profound effects? In other words, can we identify, among the ideas and knowledge produced in this book, elements that are stable and insensitive to the current situation? Similarly, can new employability issues or perspectives emerge that are linked to the health and economic crisis of the coronavirus and its direct and indirect effects?

The current pandemic, in its economic consequences, has a number of manifestations that are invariably found in all comparable periods of crisis. First, the quantitative effects on employment are massive. Globally, the ILO estimates that total working hours fell by 17.3% in the second quarter of 2020 (or 495 million FTEs), compared to 2019, with strong disparities across regions and countries, disparities accentuated ...