A bridge to achieve soft skills

• In Event: Roundtable Session 9
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Supporting Transitions, Reducing Barriers, and Promoting Positive Youth Development: From Guatemala to MENA

Proposal

In the last decade, the number of young people in Central America seeking better opportunities outside their country has increased. Many of them, with low educational levels and few resources, without access to land or opportunities to improve their income, frustrated that their country cannot provide them with hope of improving their quality of life, look for other alternatives. For this reason, as part of supporting young Guatemalans to stay in their country, generate income and actively contribute to the economy, the Puentes Project was established to empower young Guatemalans between the ages of 15 and 29. This project aims to improve their quality of life through tools that allows them to grow, improve their skills, find a job or start their own business. Puentes, funded through USAID, is implemented by World Vision as prime, in partnership with a consortium of organizations.

The Puentes team designed a soft skills curriculum called Diplomado Emprender con Exito, which helps youth, develop intra- and- interpersonal skills, and prepare them to succeed in the future (Heckman, Katz, 2012). Youth complete the 112-hour curriculum in groups of 20-25 over a period of 4-6 months, guided by trained facilitators, most of whom are also youth, and five years into the program, many of them are themselves graduates of the Diplomado Emprender con Exito. The curriculum aims to develop basic knowledge and skills that are increasingly in demand by employers or necessary to start a small business. It focuses on five key competencies: social skills, communications skills, critical and higher order thinking skills, self-control skills, and having a positive concept of oneself. As part of the curriculum, youth identify goals for the future and create a life plan.

To date, over 20,000 young people in eight cohorts have completed the Diplomado Emprender con Exito. To assess the impact of the intervention, Puentes developed a soft skill measurement scale with the purpose of identifying the progress that young people have had before (baseline) and after (endline) taking a course in soft skills.

To build this scale, an expert team worked on defining the purpose of the test, establishing a general framework for defining soft skills, and narrowing down to the key elements represented in the curriculum, which were: self-esteem, goal orientation, teamwork, critical thinking, and communication. For each of these, they defined an operational definition and a set of questions for validation, which would ultimately comprise the scale.

The soft skills measurement instrument was first administered to 2,500 youth in cohort 8 (2022). This group included young men and women between 18 and 29 years of age, with various backgrounds: participants have a variety of educational levels, socioeconomic statuses, marital statuses, and some have children. After the application of this baseline, the young people took the soft skills course, and at the end, they took the assessment again to help evaluate their progress in soft skills development.

This cohort completed the curriculum in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with its related restrictions. Several modifications had to be made to implement the curriculum during this time. A mix of in-person, virtual, and radio-based implementation was offered.

The technical team reviewed the quantitative data from the validation cohort, but then used the Bookmark methodology to define cut-off points to characterize the different level of development for each soft skill. Each skill has two cut-off points resulting if three levels. A brief narrative was developed to describe each of the three stages of skill development. The staff that work with the youth will use the narrative descriptions to assess the level of each young person and/or of the group for each of the skills, so they can ascertain where to focus their efforts for developing soft skills in the youth.

In comparing results from baseline and end line, about 30 % of all participants improved and moved one or two levels. The biggest gains were self-improvement (31 % of youth improved), goal orientation (34 % of youth improved) teamwork (28% of youth improved), critical thinking (22% of youth improved) and communication (25% of youth improved).

Following from these preliminary results, the Puentes team will conduct further analysis, looking at significant differences between men and women, minority groups, indigenous groups, learning platforms, among other comparisons. This information, complemented by interviews with participants about their perceptions of the course and their performance, will allow the project to better understand which skills youth are developing more, and to make adjustments and strengthen the areas that are not showing much improvement from baseline to end line.

Puentes is committed to ensuring that marginalized youth in Guatemala are able to develop the key skills that are critical for employment and to be successful entrepreneurs, including the soft skills that so many employers look for. This contributes to young people living in a fairer world, where they can enjoy the same opportunities as any other young person to grow and reach their potential, discovering creative ways to make a living in their country without needing to migrate. In addition, it helps the country having more independent, capable, critical and productive citizens who contribute to the economy and who are models for future generations.

Author

• Maria Jose del Valle Catalan, Proyecto Puentes