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In the depths of Scotland's last deep recession, I was sitting O-grades and Highers, and my age cohort was leaving school into a grim jobs market.

While I was fortunate enough to go to university, the evidence from my contemporaries is that those who hit the dole queue as they left school back then are still paying the price of their unfortunate timing.

Stirling University economic research, led by Professors David Bell and David Blanchflower - much of it from the USA - suggests those who didn't make a quick transition into training or work when they left school were more likely to suffer from repeated bouts of unemployment and from lower wages right up to the present.

Making those links back to the early 1980s, I felt a bond across a generation with the lads I met in Glasgow's East End for a report that was broadcast on Monday on Reporting Scotland. They are trying to find a foothold in the jobs or training market at a time when it's becoming exceptionally tough.

As Gary Hay, of Glasgow East Regeneration Agency, reminded us, it's a hirers' market out there, and employers can add conditions of experience and qualification that they would or could not do in a tighter labour market.

The most recent unemployment statistics, up to April and published last week, show there's been a rise in 18 to 24 year olds on jobseekers allowance from 21,000 last June to more than 37,000 now. That's more than 10% of the age group.

And according to Professor Bell's calculations, it means those young people make up nearly 30% of the entire claimant count, while they only represent 14% of the population.

That means that if you're aged between 18 and 24, you're twice as likely as the average Scot to be on the dole. Young men are nearly twice as young women to be looking for work, with young male unemployment rising 72% in the past year, and young women's up by 62%.

And if you're 16 or 17, you don't qualify for the dole anyway. So that's just one of the ways you might feel that you don't count.

The researchers note that youth unemployment in the UK has been on the rise, as has its its share of the total claimant count, against the downward international trends since 2004.

It adds up to a high priority of tackling youth unemployment. And the urgency gains pace in the next few weeks, as young people leave their Standard Grade and Higher exam halls and add to the queues.