Successful private sector engagement strategies to boost job placement

• In Event: Workforce Development in Changing Contexts: Private Sector Engagement for Youth Employment

Proposal

The Bridges to Employment project (Bridges) works to increase and improve the employment of vulnerable youth from El Salvador’s highest-crime municipalities within the country’s fastest-growing economic sectors. By linking vulnerable youth – including young parents, youth with disabilities, returned youth migrants, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and intersexual (LGBTI) youth – to basic social resources of work, knowledge, security, and social capital, the project worked to foster social inclusion through employment opportunities.
To improve the overall effectiveness of the country’s youth workforce development system, the project worked to foster strong and enduring partnerships between companies and training centers, aligning curricula with labor market needs, providing youth with hands-on learning opportunities, and identifying skilled youth to fill job opportunities. In this presentation Bridges will share the approaches, strategies, and lessons learned regarding private sector engagement and job placement.
Bridges worked to build ongoing partnerships and collaboration with industry associations and companies in the high growth sectors of textiles, commerce and tourism, IT, manufacturing, and renewable energy to ensure that the technical training offered to youth in El Salvador matched labor market needs. We will discuss Bridges’ technical/vocational curricula upgrading efforts; and the assistance we provided training centers to design new courses, upgrade existing courses, review lesson plans. Bridges also introduced new teaching methodologies and developed learning manuals. Bridges also convened a series of coordination meetings between the training centers, El Salvador Institute of Professional Training (INSAFORP) and experts from the textile industry to update course curricula that addressed existing training gaps in the industry. Additionally, employers routinely shared with Bridges that soft skills such as self-esteem, communications, and critical thinking are essential for workplace success. Addressing this, Bridges developed a toolkit to help training centers and their instructors integrate life skills into their existing technical curricula, and new life skills modules – critical thinking and self-control – to complete the national life skills curriculum.
Training centers lacked experience helping youth find jobs. To address this issue, the project helped grantee training centers develop the staff capacity and institutional ability to provide critical labor orientation, job readiness, and job placement support to youth. We will present Bridges’ efforts to boost training center capacity to provide high-quality job placement services through the C-Orienta model. C-Orientas serve as one-stop shops, where youth can receive personalized assistance to meet their individual needs, including 1) career guidance, 2) labor orientation and coaching on how to strengthen their competitiveness in hiring processes 3) information about available training and educational opportunities, 4) job search assistance, 5) resources to help youth become entrepreneurs, 6) tailored psychosocial assistance and other support services. As a result of the project’s collaboration with a broad variety of private sector representatives to better prepare youth to meet employer needs and help open doors, and the creation of C-Orienta in seven locations within training centers, a total of 4,706 vulnerable got a new or better job. These youth work for 1,204 different employers in 90 municipalities across the country. In this panel, we will share how the project achieved this.

Author

• Caterina Valero, DAI