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

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

Development of Soft Skills Education in Non-Formal Education to Indonesian Society

“…As a result, efforts to improve these skills have become an increasing part of youth employment programs in many developing countries, especially in Latin America [22]. For example, the entra 21 program implemented in 18 Latin American countries includes a soft skills training component.…”

“…In a review of 28 studies using employer surveys in different countries, Cunningham and Villaseñor [22] find that socio-emotional skills are the first priority of 76.5 % of the studies that rank employer skill preferences. As a result, efforts to improve these skills have become an increasing part of youth employment programs in many developing countries, especially in Latin America [22].…”

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“…These expectations far exceed the actual impact of 2 percentage points seen in Table 1. Groh et al (2016b) likewise show that policymakers in Jordan expected the wage subsidy program to have lasting impacts on youth employment, in contrast to the realized impacts.…”

“…A first testament to this comes from a number of the studies covered in this review being interventions designed by the researchers themselves, in addition to those evaluating programs that governments were already going to implement. Secondly, Groh et al (2016b) carried out an expectations elicitation exercise when presenting the results of their Jordan wage subsidy research. They find that development economists on average expected a 10 percentage point increase in employment after the subsidy had ended, compared to the 2.8…”

The Dozen Things Experimental Economists Should Do (More of)

“…Alternatively, estimates for the prestudy odds may be obtained by consulting experts. As examples, consider Groh et al () who undertake an “audience expectation elicitation exercise” by collecting treatment effect estimates from members of their audience prior to presenting their results, Coville and Vivalt () who survey a panel of researchers to collect anticipated effects in various development economics studies, or DellaVigna and Pope () who compare expert and nonexpert forecasts. Finally, Dreber et al () use prediction markets to obtain estimates for prior probabilities of specific hypotheses being true.…”