Strengthening Cultural Mentality and Life Skills for Youth Empowerment

Young generations are an asset for sustainable country and must be given full attention to establish themselves being the future leaders. They are the most important factor to determine the progressive and existing nation. Demographic factors of youth can be positive or contradictory side for a country. It can be the main capital for advancing development or it will be a big problem if there is no good management to come up with them. Now, many of them are facing uncertainty condition because of hard competition for getting a job. To empowering them, we need to analyze what are the main factors that should be identified and how to solve them.

The first factor is the low cultural mentality. It means that the youth doesn’t have a good thinking and characters. They have pessimistic view about their life and lack of confidence. They don’t want to involve in any issues that can add their knowledge and experience. Laziness is one of the criteria in this case because they are very comfortable with their family background.

For solving this problem, we have to encourage young generation to aware about their competences starting from family, school, and community environments. We cannot let them jump to the deep darkness and make their abilities in disappearance. We need to create a cultural mental revolution to call back youth spirit. The goal of mental revolution regarding to Rahman (1973) is to change the thinking way, view, and attitude of people to adapt themselves to the desire and support to gain success in a whole life.

The second factor is lack of life skills. Normally, everybody has special skill and ability that he or she can explore being professional person. The problem is many of them sometimes late to know about it. As the young generations, they have to identify what their passion is. If they don’t know about our expertise, they can try anything by trial and error. It will be better than only waiting a miracle. They need professional life skills training to gaining successful job and satisfied salary. Tortu and Botvin (1989), the purpose of training is to familiarize intervention providers with the program, its rationale, and the results of prior studies as well as give providers an opportunity to learn and practice the skills needed to implement the program successfully.

In this era, many opportunities open to young generations to engage their professional carrier. To practicing the skills, they can do business from tiny area to be the huge one if they want. There are many professional training providing life skills for youth. The new form of jobs for youth has been changing to many types. They can be the trainers or motivational trainers. They can do online marketing by using computer at home. They can be the designers of learning communities and empowerment. They can be the political consultants. We could not only hope to be a civil servant because it is so limited and has complicated procedures.

References:

Rahman, Senu Abdul. (1973). Revolusi Mental. Kuala Lumpur: Penerbitan Utusan Melayu.

Tortu, S., and Botvin, G.J. (1989). School-Based Smoking Prevention: The Teacher Training Process. Preventive Medicine 18:280−289.