USAID’s revised guidance for measuring employment outcomes of youth employment programs

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Youth with meaningful employment contribute to a stable and strong workforce, global security and economic prosperity. USAID's youth employment programs prepare young people for meaningful work opportunities through coaching, internship placement, job matching, skills development and entrepreneurship programs. In addition, USAID works with local businesses to ensure training responds to the needs of the job market. From 2011 to 2015, USAID programs have connected more than 609,000 individuals with new or improved employment. In that context, building the evidence base for what works in youth employment programming has become a top priority of the USAID’s Office of Education.

Align with this priority, the Office of Education has been working over the past year to develop better standard indicators and data collection instruments to consistently and accurately track and assess results of youth employment programs. The panel presentation will discuss USAID’s updated guidance for measuring the new and revised standard indicators for youth employment programs, specifically related to employment rate, level of earning, quality of employment and employment skills. The panel presentation will include three complementary sessions:

(1) The first session will provide an overview of the updated USAID guidance on measuring employment outcomes of youth employment programs (both quantity and quality of employment), and will specifically focus on USAID’s new employment survey.

(2) The second session will provide an overview on USAID’s new work in developing an employment quality index to help more adequately capture changes in the quality of youth employment alongside earnings.

(3) The third session will present USAID’s current work refining standard global indicators on employment skills for workforce development programs. Specifically, the session will discuss the definitions and measurement approaches for three new skills-related indicators focusing on technical and vocational skills, literacy and numeracy skills, and soft skills.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Youth Development and Education

Presenter

• Mousumi Sakar, Consultant

Individual Presentations

• USAID’s Employment Survey for Measuring Outcomes of Youth Employment Programs - Nancy Taggart, US Agency for International Development (USAID)

• USAID’s Revised Guidance for Measuring Employment Skills - Catherine Honeyman, World Learning

• What Do They Remember? Probing for Recall in an Employment Survey Using Cognitive Interviews for USAID’s Employment Programs - Elena Walls, US Agency for International Development (USAID); Mousumi Sakar, Consultant

Discussant

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