From soft skills to labor skills: adapting soft skills trainings to the needs for your target populations.

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Overview:
This panel will present the experiences and lessons of three different workforce development projects’ efforts to adapt their soft skills training- an important component of workforce development programming- to the local context and labor market. Three United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded workforce development (WFD) projects in Central America (in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras) are providing vulnerable at-risk youth a combination soft skills training and other technical skills to increase employability. Despite the apparent similarities of implementing youth workforce development projects in Central America, this panel will showcase how the conditions in each region have affected the type of soft skills training youth receive and how the training is delivered to develop positive youth outcomes. Presenters will discuss (1) how they adapted their soft skills training to the needs of the local labor markets; (2) how they altered the curriculum to different target populations within the project population (women, indigenous communities, youth at risk with the law, multi-ethnic communities, LGBTQ); (3) how they determined to sequence- or integrate- soft and technical skills trainings; and (4) how they measure success. By exchanging perspectives from the three similar yet distinct projects in Central America, the panel will feature lessons learned and best practices for future WFD programming in the region as well as in other contexts.

The WFD Learning Agenda:
USAID currently funds a diverse set of activities related to workforce development across the globe. USAID’s Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) education team, identified six different active USAID-funded WFD projects in the region and created the Central America Workforce Development Learning Agenda. The six projects are occurring in the Northern Triangle countries (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as well as Nicaragua and Jamaica. The projects aim to increase workforce readiness and job insertion for at-risk or disadvantaged youth ages 10 to 30 in project countries. Projects offer a variety of WFD and education-related services through existing local WFD organizations. They also work with the local private and public sectors to facilitate employment of trained youth.

The WFD Learning Agenda has three main objectives: (1) share learning across USAID Missions and implementing partners in Central America; (2) report on the achievements of all six projects across four common learning areas that are important for WFD programming: (a) youth participation in WFD projects, (b) youth employment or education after completing the project, (c) engagement with the private sector and other actors in the labor market, and (d) WFD organizational capacity strengthening; and (3) build a community of practice (CoP) around youth WFD. The CoP is an innovative way to facilitate the exchange of information and learnings for projects working on very similar issues, but often facing different challenges. By facilitating the exchanges, these projects have learned from each other and created exchanges between their programs to further their program objectives.

Soft skills training:
An increasing number of researchers, policymakers, and program implementers recognize the importance of soft skills to succeed in today’s labor markets. In fact, employers around the world have reported that many technically-qualified job candidates lack the soft skills sometimes needed to fill available positions (Manpower Group, 2013).The predictive power of these skills (also referred as transferrable, life, social-emotional, essential, behavioral, character, core or non-cognitive skills), rivals and sometimes exceeds that of cognitive skills for key outcomes such as employment, educational achievement, health, and even criminality (Kautz et al, 2014). While there is a consensus that developing soft skills for young people is important, there is not a consensus- and indeed a dearth of evidence- as to the optimal approach for delivery of soft skills training to vulnerable youth in low and middle include countries. Further details can be found in the USAID funded systematic review of positive youth development (PYD) – of which soft skills is an outcome- documenting how these approaches have been applied to low and middle include countries (Making Cents, 2017).

This panel will reflect on the experiences of three USAID funded WFD projects in delivering soft skills training adapted to the needs of their targeted population. Each presentation will focus on how their soft skills training curriculum was designed, how it was then adapted to respond to the local conditions as well as the needs of the local labor market, and why the soft skills program was offered prior to, or integrated with, technical programs. Puentes, operating in the rural Western Highlands of Guatemala, will present approaches and lessons learned developing a soft skills (core skills) curriculum as a requirement to enrolling in technical tracks. Once the core skills program was developed, it was further tailored to the needs of indigenous communities. In Nicaragua, the Technical Vocational Education and Training Strengthening for At-Risk Youth (TVET-SAY) project works with multi-ethnic communities in the Caribbean Coast and has to adapt their soft skills training- which it integrates into its technical program. The project has adapted its training to the local cultural context as well as the local labor market that has a limited private sector presence and employment opportunities thereby creating a need for entrepreneurial skills. Honduras Empleando Futuros (EF) project operates in insecure urban environments in Honduras. Due to the safety concerns of some of the project locations, as well as the type of youth EF targets, the project has adapted the life skills curriculum to youth at high levels of risk (including some youth who have engaged with the law), including training and in the recipients community. Presenters will compare and contrast their experiences, including a discussion of common best practices across the varied experiences.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Youth Development and Education

Chair

• Emilie Bagby, Mathematica Policy Research

Individual Presentations

• Soft skills training for rural indigenous youth population. A case study from Guatemala. - Sara Sywulka, World Vision

• Adapting soft skills training with the help of COMPAS-T, a measurement tool to assess risk. Experiences from the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast. - Reinaldo Sánchez, Creative Associates

• Life skills training in gang controlled areas. A case study from Honduras. - Paul Teeple, Banyan Global; Linsey Jaco, banyan global

• How are social and emotional learning and life skills defined across the world? Looking inside and across international frameworks - Katharine Elizabeth Brush, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Rebecca Bailey, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Bryan Nelson, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Emily Meland, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Discussant

• Nancy Taggart, US Agency for International Development (USAID)