In 1998, 116,000 young people left education without qualifications. In the context of a general rise in the level of education, these young people have more difficulty finding a job than their qualified counterparts. Although one in three quickly finds long-term employment, the others spend their first three years and beyond in the labour market looking for employment. These young people, lacking qualifications and faced with the competition of highly-qualified people or the reluctance of employers to employ them, often turn to the Government employment measures designed to help them. More than four in ten young people without qualifications have benefited from training, a contrat en alternance (paid apprenticeship contract), a contrat emploi solidarité (solidarity employment contract) or an emploi jeune (youth insertion job) during the first seven years of their working life, and for 16% of young people without qualifications these measures greatly structure their first few years in the labour market. Young people are today turning to these Government employment measures several years after they have left education more often than before. These measures are not necessarily associated with precarious employment, since more than one in four young people without qualifications who have benefited from them have been in relatively stable employment. Nevertheless, four times out of ten the young people who benefit from these measures are on fixed-term contracts or are unemployed, and one time out of ten the young person is economically inactive.