Despite the slowing of government hiring in Egypt, research on youth shows that the government remains the employer of choice for young people, particularly young women. The desirability of a government job has been one of the enduring findings of youth-focused studies that are based on surveys, polls, and qualitative fieldwork (eg Population Council 2011; Barsoum 2004). This chapter takes this argument further using recently collected survey data. The motivation of the analysis in this chapter is twofold. First, the chapter provides supporting evidence of the continued valorization of a government job among youth by looking at the job search behavior of unemployed educated youth (aged 15–29). Second, the chapter looks at what it really is that young people look for in these jobs by analyzing data about job satisfaction and job characteristics.

The analysis in this chapter shows that youth continue to apply for government/public sector jobs and that the search for these jobs is fruitful for a substantial proportion of youth among the educated. This chapter also shows that the majority of jobs held by employed youth in the private sector provide them with no work contracts, no access to social insurance contributory schemes, nor health insurance. This demonstrates the compromised quality of jobs in Egypt’s private sector for youth, in terms of access to work benefits. Work informality within Egypt’s private sector, understood in this chapter as lack of access to work insurance and social security contributory schemes, remains a major factor in the continued preference for a government/public