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

Artikel

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: IZA Journal of Labor & Development ; ISSN: 2193-9020 ; Volume: 5 ; Year: 2016 ; Issue: 9 ; Pages: 1-23 ; Heidelberg: Springer

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development ; Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration ; Labor Economics Policies ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
• Subject: Soft skills ; Youth unemployment ; Randomized experiment ; Expectation elicitation

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Groh, Matthew ; Krishnan, Nandini ; McKenzie, David ; Vishwanath, Tara
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Springer
• (where): Heidelberg
• (when): 2016

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1186/s40175-016-0055-9
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/152428
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET