Youth Jobs PaTH

Youth Jobs PaTH was a youth employment program that operated in Australia between 2017 and 2022. The program served as a partial replacement for the Work for the Dole scheme and provided job training and voluntary work experience placements of between four and twelve weeks for unemployed young people. The goal of the program was for unemployed young people to move through the three stage of Prepare, Trial and Hire (PaTH) — they would first undertake skills training, then would be taken on by a host business for an internship of between four and twelve weeks, and then would find paid employment, either with their internship host or with another employer using the skills and experience they had acquired during their internship. The Turnbull government announced the scheme in the 2016–17 Budget and committed $751.7 million to the program over four years. The scheme was scrapped by the Albanese government after the Australian Labor Party came to power in the 2022 election.

The scheme had some success, with roughly half of participants finding a job within three months of the end of their internship placement. But the program consistently fell well short of participation targets. The scheme resulted in 12,741 internship placements between 2017 and 2022, well short of its original goal of 120,000. The PaTH program also faced persistent criticism for paying interns less than minimum wage and for potentially displacing ordinary entry-level workers.