Youth Opportunity Compass

The Youth Opportunity Compass is an online dashboard combining publicly available data and local knowledge on youth unemployment

The Youth Opportunity Compass (the Compass) is a National Youth Employment Body (NYEB) initiative which seeks to address challenges faced by local stakeholders in accessing meaningful data on barriers to youth employment. The Compass aims to make it easier for community stakeholders to access and use data to drive responses to youth unemployment in their local area by: sourcing local data on youth employment; bringing data together from multiple websites; and addressing barriers to data access such as registration or data literacy.

After initial proof of concept, prototypes of the Compass were developed for Warrnambool and Logan, the Macquarie Group Foundation funded two years of development of the Compass for Adelaide, Darwin, the Gold Coast, Eurobodalla and Frankston Morning Peninsula, as well as expansion of the existing Compasses in Warrnambool and Logan.

In July 2024 the Tasmanian Government, through the Department of State Growth, also commissioned the development of a prototype Compass for Tasmania.

Co-designing a Compass within the NYEB

The data included in each Compass is co-designed with community stakeholders in a Community Investment Committee (CIC). They collaborate to identify their area’s needs around youth employment, then identify the types of data they struggle to access and the data that they require. This can include demographic data, data on labour market activity, data on enrolment in training, data on housing and rentals, or data on access to social services.

Once chosen data types have been identified, CICs work with their enabling organisation to co-design a Compass prototype for their region. After the place-specific Compass is built, it is provided to the CIC for exploration and sharing with their local network.

The enabling organisation supports the CIC to apply the Compass to existing programs of work and to inform strategic planning. For example, it could be used to identify labour market need and opportunity, barriers to accessing training, demographic changes, housing, transport and social support needs and opportunities.

Once a Compass is in place, it is important to continue to gather data to demonstrate its impact on youth employment. Who is using the Compass? What type of decisions does it enable? How has it been used to support design and collaboration efforts? Who outside the CIC has accessed and benefited from the Compass.

“I’m not a really techy person ... I thought omg I hope it’s not too hard to use, but everything is explained and colour coded as well which made it really easy to use.” – Adelaide stakeholder

“[It’s] simple enough for me. Didn’t have to be a data geek to follow along.” – Darwin stakeholder

For more information reach out to Kira Clarke or Madeleine Morey