USAID’s Revised Guidance for Measuring Skills for Workforce Development Programs

• In Event: Measuring soft skills: concepts, methods and results

Proposal

Youth workforce development programming globally includes a wide range of education and training types as well as diverse efforts to link young people to formal employment, to business incubation, improved agricultural production, and value chain development. These interventions typically presuppose that some skill development is essential for achieving improved workforce outcomes for youth—but there continues to be ongoing discussion of which skills should be prioritized for teaching and measurement. This session will present USAID’s current work refining standard global F-standard indicators on skills for workforce development programs. The session will discuss USAID’s upcoming guidance for measuring skills, including the definitions and measurement approaches for three new skills-related indicators focusing on technical and vocational skills, literacy and numeracy skills, and soft skills. This guidance draws on a background literary review to define and measure these three distinct sets of skills. It recommends that programs measure technical and vocational skills on a standard of proficiency in a locally-relevant certification system. It recommends measurement of literacy, numeracy, --and in some cases digital literacy—for programs working with populations that need to build these foundational skills. And it recommends measurement of a core set of soft skills as well as providing a new open-source assessment tool that programs can draw upon if they do not have their own validated assessment methods for soft skills.

The presentation will offer an overview of the guidance, address some common challenges and questions, and invite feedback and discussion from the session attendees.

Author

• Laurence Marie Dessein, US Agency for International Development (USAID)