World Youth Skills: Celebrating and Building on What We Know

This blog was co-written by David Fein and Nicole Goldin, former Principal Associates at Abt.

Persistently high youth unemployment and underemployment around the globe indicate that millions of individuals are struggling to acquire the knowledge and skills needed for lifelong success. The costs, beyond limited opportunities for youth themselves, can include insufficient talent to drive economic growth and a host of societal challenges arising from poverty.

Long-term technological shifts have increased the productivity and earnings of workers with advanced skills, but incomes for those with low skills have stagnated or declined. A series of recessions have accelerated these shifts and taken a disproportionate toll on youth with less education and training. The recent pandemic’s effects were particularly negative in sectors that employ a higher share of youth, namely services, retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. As a result, gaps in financial well-being and opportunities have widened both across and within nations.

On a brighter note, concerted efforts by a constellation of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, including the private sector, have identified a range of promising responses to these inequities. As we mark World Youth Skills Day, we’d like to reflect on some of the solutions for improving skills of youth around the world that Abt and others have helped to test and deploy.

But What Skills?

The skills likely to matter to potential employers are diverse, often ill-defined, and hard to measure in today’s ever-changing economic landscape. There is, nonetheless, a growing consensus that meeting the increasing demand for general or “essential” skills—as distinct from the technical knowledge and ability required for particular occupations—must play a central role in closing gaps in opportunities worldwide.

One broad group of essential skills includes “cognitive” abilities—abilities that include reasoning, problem-solving, and processing information (including digitally). A second category includes skills variously labeled “soft,” “socioemotional,” or “psychosocial,” which can range from personality traits (e.g., emotional self-regulation, sociability) to attitudes and behaviors required for success at work (e.g., timeliness, suitable dress and appearance, and effective communication).

Employers around the world often put shortages of workers with these essential skills at the top of their list of critical challenge, and research shows continued growth in demand for such skills. Addressing this demand—as well as the demand for technical skills in fast-growing fields—belongs at the center of efforts to reduce unemployment for youth around the globe.

Open Questions

As we review effective skill-building solutions, World Youth Skills Day is a fitting occasion to sharpen the questions that must be addressed before bringing these solutions to scale. A number of challenges arise from the fact that the most effective programs—like Year Up—tend to be intensive, comprehensive, and expensive. Substantial investments in youth may be necessary to produce significant gains in skills and career opportunities, and the strong evidence from Year Up shows that the financial benefits to society can greatly outweigh the costs.

Nevertheless, upskilling will be easier to finance if effectiveness can be maintained while lowering costs, and some services may be more critical to making an impact than others. There is much we don’t understand about how these programs work, and for which youth—including the particular kinds of skills and amounts of training needed to generate substantial earnings gains. A host of questions connected to adapting strategies for different national and sub-national contexts, as well for different cohorts of youth—for example young men versus young women—also deserve the highest quality research and evaluation we can muster. Better evidence can help us design programs that offer wider populations the training, supports, and work experience they need.

At Abt, we see U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 4 for Education on the horizon and believe that talent is universal, but opportunities must be more equitably available. In the U.S. and developing countries alike, we are committed to gathering, sharing, and applying the evidence on skills to inform, design, and implement programs and policies that enable youth to reach their full potential and help countries prosper.