The impact of soft skills training on female youth employment: evidence from a randomized experiment in Jordan

Matthew Groh,Nandini Krishnan,Tara Vishwanath,David Mckenzie

doi:10.1186/s40175-016-0055-9

Abstract

Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper reports on a randomized experiment in Jordan in which female community college graduates were randomly assigned to a soft skills training program. Despite this program being twice as long in length as the average program in the region, and taught by a well-regarded provider, we find soft skills training does not have any significant employment impact in three rounds of follow-up surveys. We elicit expectations of academics and development professionals and reveal that these findings are novel and unexpected. JEL codes: O12, O15, J08, J16

Highlights

Firms around the world complain that formal schooling, at best, teaches only the technical skills workers need but that many youth are lacking in the soft skills needed for success in the workplace—such as how to interact with customers, how to work in teams, how to act professionally, and even how to properly represent themselves in job interviews in the first place
Despite the course being taught by a wellregarded provider and offering twice as many hours of training as the average employability program does in the region, we find that soft skills training did not have any significant impact on any of a range of different employment measures for these young women over any of these time horizons
The results reveal considerable heterogeneity in the expected outcome of these two employment programs, with a general bias towards expecting soft skills training to be more effective than it was in practice, and for there to be a complementarity with wage subsidies which does not exist in practice

Summary

Introduction

Firms around the world complain that formal schooling, at best, teaches only the technical skills workers need but that many youth are lacking in the soft skills needed for success in the workplace—such as how to interact with customers, how to work in teams, how to act professionally, and even how to properly represent themselves in job interviews in the first place. Despite the course being taught by a wellregarded provider and offering twice as many hours of training as the average employability program does in the region, we find that soft skills training did not have any significant impact on any of a range of different employment measures for these young women over any of these time horizons. −0.057 (0.114) −0.220** (0.109) −0.270** (0.110) −0.064 (0.107) 0.137 (0.107) −0.514*** (0.155) 0.008 (0.032) 0.056** (0.028) −0.019 (0.024) 0.340** (0.165) 0.319*** (0.111) 599 several measures of soft skills in a different Jordanian youth population and show these soft skills are predictive of future employment outcomes This approach required individuals to come in person to a testing center, where they were tested in both individual and group settings, with the tests taking an hour to complete. The consequence is that we can only report the above information that participants expressed a high degree of satisfaction with the course content but are not able to distinguish how much they learned during training

Results

Conclusions

Variable definition