Study on the IADB’s multi-country New Employment Opportunities (NEO) initiative for the development of socio-emotional skills with vulnerable young people

• In Event: Building life skills/soft skills/21st century skills at scale and sustainably in LMICs

Proposal

The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is characterized by having a persistently high proportion of young people who drop out of high school, do not study or work, have high levels of youth unemployment and levels of informal labor. The problem has become more acute in the 21st century because technological progress and the speed at which knowledge is reproduced, together with the skills required by the labor market, have accelerated the process of obsolescence of traditional educational models. It has been recognized that developing academic skills is not enough, and that these must be complemented with other skills and abilities, which have been called "socio-emotional" or "life" skills, among other names.

Life skills are highly demanded by employers and necessary for young people to be competitive in the jobs of the future, but have not been effectively incorporated into formal and non-formal education. The NEO initiative is a regional initiative implemented in 10 LAC countries that seeks to close the skills gap of vulnerable youth and meet the demand for qualified personnel by companies through multisectoral partnerships. These alliances bring together the public, private and civil society sectors to work in a coordinated manner and seek systemic, scalable and sustainable solutions to the problem of youth unemployment.

Within the NEO initiative, the Passport to success (PTS) curriculum is implemented with more than 200 providers in LAC with a systematized model to ensure quality at scale in secondary schools and job training centers. The PTS curriculum for life skills program developed by the International Youth Foundation that provides young people with the knowledge that will help them stay in school, and that is in high demand among employers.

The "Study on the strategies promoted under the NEO Initiative for the development of socio-emotional skills with vulnerable youth" includes qualitative knowledge comparing the experiences in Colombia, El Salvador, Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic from implementing the PTS program. It describes the processes of analyzing, training and implementation and provides recommendations for public, private and civil sector entities interested in formulating policies and programs to equip young people with the social and emotional skills required to perform successfully in a work environment. The key questions answered are: what are the best processes and instruments to identify the social-emotional skills required by the labor market? How are they incorporated into a training curriculum? What strategies were used to transfer the PTS program to institutions in a sustainable way? What was the process of selection and training of trainers in PTS? What are the recommendations to ensure the quality and sustainability of training in socio-emotional skills? What challenges do the education and training for work sectors face in developing this type of competences? What is the influence that the PTS curriculum seems to have on the employability of young people?

Author

• Elena Heredero Rodriquez, InterAmerican Development Bank