Abstract
Despite potentially high gains in terms of labour market outcomes, the demand for vocational training programs remains low in France, in particular for young and low-educated people. Since the 2008 economic crisis, the French government implemented numerous campaigns to provide and finance high-quality training places, inform jobseekers, and motivate them to participate. Despite these efforts, the entry rate into training programs for jobseekers has been consistently around 10% since 2010. In cooperation with the French Public Employment Service (France Travail), we develop light-touch, scalable interventions to directly address the barriers to training enrollment. In a preparatory step, we administered a survey to 20,048 jobseekers to comprehensively study the barriers preventing individuals from taking up vocational training. The key emerging finding is the importance of beliefs: Jobseekers view the direct costs of training as the biggest external obstacle to take-up, but they simultaneously hold pessimistic beliefs about the availability of funding. In addition, we find evidence that jobseekers may be constrained by their beliefs about themselves, and in particular about their ability to achieve desirable outcomes and overcome obstacles. Such beliefs are referred to as “self-efficacy” in the psychology literature (Bandura 1977), and have recently gained traction in economics (McKelway 2020, John and Orkin 2021, Ghosal et al. 2020). We design and test four interventions aimed at changing jobseekers’ beliefs, using different versions of a training support app.