The impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-8 on young people both seeking and in work was immediate and typically disproportionate to older age groups (OECD 2010). The impact of precarious work, and particularly unemployment, on young people’s mental health and wellbeing is widely documented - ranging from depression, loss of hope, isolation and financial insecurity, amongst others (Hillman & McMillan 2005). These impacts were sometimes ironically compounded and intensified by economic and political responses to the GFC (Walsh 2016).

In the moral economies of neo-Liberalism and austerity, young people in transition from school to work are entering both new and familiar territories. Well-trodden business mantras about skills shortages, wider orthodoxies around the value and purpose of education, and entrenched forms of inequality and marginalisation intersect and collide with recent social, economic and geographic impacts of the GFC and various policy responses to them. In a very profound way, these conditions are challenging a key assumption and promise that education and training will lead to a better life. One outcome of this is a need to develop critical responses to these conditions - both to critically analyse them and come up with practical responses.

Accompanying the challenges of workforce marginalisation are proposals to reinforce and extend the development of the competencies, skills and dispositions to navigate changing worlds of work. As the challenges, concerns and lifestyles of young people have become enmeshed in the global so too, it is argued, is a need to foster the literacies necessary for them to understand and participate in the contemporary fluid workforce. This paper examines renewed international interest in the foundation and soft-skills of young people, and their importance to young people's capacity to navigate uncertain and fluid labour markets.

This discussion began with my efforts as an educator to grapple with conceptualising ways of enabling young people to navigate the material realities of contemporary working life, while theorising possibilities for resilience and critical responses to the pervasive effects and seeming ideological dominance of neoliberalism (Walsh 2016). This discussion locates proposals to develop these literacies within a wider context of neoliberal policy responses to youth unemployment and precarity. It then proposes the theoretical concept of ‘adversity capital’ as a basis for critically understanding the recent move from 'risk to resilience' (Rose 2014). Serving as a kind of adversity capital, these skills and literacies enable young people to be more adaptive, flexible and resilient. 

The notion of adversity capital may be problematic. For example, it is argued that the need to better develop soft-skills – though valuable – may also be seen to reaffirm conditions of precarity by positioning young people within deregulated labour markets as permanent subjects of fluidity and the 'flexible' demands of economic capital. But this form of capital also offers scope for resistance to responsibilisation, to challenge certain moral norms underpinning neoliberalism. As Sayer (2007, p. 261) suggests, 'Moral norms are not merely conventions, but embody assumptions about what well-being consists in, and these can be evaluated.' Adversity capital consequently builds on a notion of resilience that is located within a wider social ecology beyond young individuals, but which also sees them as agents of possible change. Using Sayer's approach to moral economy as critique, this paper critically explores the conceptual and practical possibilities - and potential limitations - of harnessing and developing adversity capital in educational contexts.

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