People at the beginning of their professional careers constitute a group particularly exposed to the risk of labour market exclusion, which is reflected by a relatively high incidence of unemployment, low-quality employment or economic inactivity. Despite the fact that in many countries youth employment issues have been placed high on the political agenda, little progress has been achieved. The difficulties young people experience when looking for stable employment not only reduce their income, but also increase the probability of risky behaviours, lead to the postponing of household and family formation and have a detrimental effect on their health and subjective wellbeing. In this study we focus on this last aspect investigating the relationship between employment and wellbeing among young people. We start from analysing the cases of three countries representing different models of economies: Germany, Great Britain and Poland. The perspective of this analysis is definitely not comparative. By analysing three independent datasets (SOEP for Germany, Understanding Society for Great Britain, Social Diagnosis for Poland) which cover different time periods and contain differently defined sets of variables,we try to investigate how robust is the employment-wellbeing relationship among young people. In the second part of the paper we take a comparative perspective and try to identifythe macro (country-level) factors influencing the strength of the relationship between themployment and the level of individual wellbeing with the use of the data from the European Social Survey. In this part of the paper we study also the other dimension of employment-wellbeing relationship by investigating the potential impact of unemployment experiences on the individual level of trust. Throughout the paper we will often refer to both the employment -wellbeing relationship and the unemployment-wellbeing relationship. However, since we compare the wellbeing of employees and unemployed, the employment-wellbeing relationship and unemployment-wellbeing relationship are two sides of the same coin. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present the literature review and we summarize the methodological challenges related to the estimation the of the employment-wellbeing relationship. In Section 3 we present the results of the employment-wellbeing relationship estimation for three countries: Germany, Great Britain and Poland. In Section 4 we analyse the employment-wellbeing relationship in the comparative perspective with the useof the ESS dataset. Section 5 concludes.