Southeast Asia stands at a critical crossroads as its young workforce confronts the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence on labour markets. With a majority of the population under 35, entry-level roles have traditionally served as the gateway to career progression. However, AI is increasingly automating routine tasks, leading to declining entry-level hiring and rising uncertainty for young workers. As transition pathways weaken, the risk of widespread youth precarity is growing.

These disruptions expose deeper structural gaps within the region’s workforce ecosystem. A key challenge is the mismatch between fast-evolving skill demands and traditional education systems, where degree programmes struggle to keep pace with technological change. While policymakers have called for stronger industry–academe collaboration, many efforts remain aspirational, resulting in graduates entering the workforce with misaligned skills.\

Compounding this are limited pathways into resilient, human-centric sectors and persistent barriers to labour mobility. Fields like healthcare and education remain undervalued despite growing demand, while fragmented regional frameworks and weak protections for non-traditional work constrain mobility. Together, these gaps limit the adaptability and opportunities available to young workers.

This policy brief presents actionable recommendations to address these challenges, focusing on education reform, workforce resilience, and regional mobility. It outlines how systems and incentives can be better aligned so that AI-driven transformation expands opportunities for young people.

Key policy considerations

To improve young workforce resiliency, the brief outlines three priority areas of action:

• Accelerating Education Reforms
  Governments should transition toward more adaptive education systems that respond to real-time labour market needs. This includes integrating data-driven curriculum updates, embedding structured work-integrated learning, and strengthening industry–academe collaboration through clear financial and institutional incentives.
• Cultivating Human-Centric Sectors
  Policymakers should expand pathways into resilient, human-centric sectors such as healthcare, education, and care services. This can be achieved by creating public employment pipelines, streamlining certification processes, and leveraging AI as an augmentative tool to enhance productivity and job quality in these fields.
• Operationalising Regional Mobility and Strengthening Safety Nets
  Efforts should focus on enabling smoother cross-border talent mobility while ensuring protections for diverse forms of work. This includes improving the implementation of regional agreements, modernising social protection systems for non-traditional workers, and designing mobility frameworks that promote skills circulation while mitigating risks such as brain drain.