Soft Skills for the Unemployed

Last registered on April 13, 2023
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Soft Skills for the Unemployed
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0011190
Initial registration date
April 05, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
April 13, 2023, 3:44 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Johanna Roth
Affiliation
Sciences Po
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Maria Guadalupe
PI Affiliation
Insead
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PI Name
Alexandra Roulet
PI Affiliation
Insead
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Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2023-04-04
End date
2025-01-01
Keywords
Labor
Additional Keywords
JEL code(s)
J24, J64, J68
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
While soft skills are increasingly rewarded in labor markets (Heckman and Kautz, 2012, Deming, 2017), employers often mention a lack of soft skills among candidates as a reason for unfilled vacancies (Pôle Emploi, 2018). To address this issue, the French unemployment agency, Pôle Emploi, identified a set of 16 soft skills that were essential for job seekers and designed a training specifically geared to soft skill development. The training provided by Pôle Emploi to job seekers is called “Valoriser son Image Pro (VSI)”. The training is administered by partner training agencies and has a one-week module that can be supplemented by up to another week.

In this project, we are designing a randomized control trial using an encouragement design via calls to evaluate whether this soft skill training program improves the situation of its beneficiaries (e.g. unemployment duration and employment outcomes) and if so through which channels. The main aim of this project is to answer the following questions: Are soft skills malleable in adulthood? How do they impact job search behavior and job finding outcomes? In a second project, we plan to use our experimental sample to better understand how soft skills impact the take up of training.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Guadalupe, Maria , Johanna Roth and Alexandra Roulet. 2023. "Soft Skills for the Unemployed." AEA RCT Registry. April 13. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.11190-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Professional callers (tele-counselors) from a call center platform engaged by Pôle Emploi will call the job seekers in the treatment group and present the VSI training to them (based on a script), encourage them to join and inscribe them directly to participate.
Intervention Start Date
2023-04-19
Intervention End Date
2023-06-23

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Changes in soft skills, unemployment duration and employment outcomes.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Soft skills is a broad term that encompasses many dimensions. We have selected a few dimensions that are relevant in our context based on the qualitative evaluation of VSI and related literature (Heckman and Kautz, 2012, Deming, 2017, Schlosser and Shanan, 2022). We will measure job search autonomy, self-efficacy (job and general), locus of control, big 5 personality traits. We use selected items from validated scales. Given there are many dimensions, we will create an overall indexed measure following Kling et al. (2007).

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Soft skill awareness, changes in search behavior, changes in additional soft skill measures (anxiety about job search, team work), take up of training.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Soft skill awareness: We will measure the perception of the importance of soft skills relative to technical skills and to a diploma for the job seekers.

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Our experiment relies on an encouragement design where we randomize the probability of treatment (receiving a call to do the training). We will randomize into two groups, a treatment and a control group, stratified by education, gender and baseline soft skills measure.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done in office by a computer.
Randomization Unit
Individual level.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
Randomization is at the individual level, stratified by education, gender and baseline soft skills measure.
403200 job seekers receive the baseline survey; distributed across 3 cohorts, separated by one month. Resulting experimental sample after the baseline survey estimated to be 33600 job seekers; per cohort: around 11200 jobseekers.
Sample size: planned number of observations
403200 job seekers receive the baseline survey. Resulting experimental sample after the baseline survey estimated to be 33600 job seekers.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
Total of 16800 job seekers in treatment and 16800 job seekers in control.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
We calculated sample sizes to have sufficient numbers at the endline survey, based on the pilot results on baseline completion rate (15%), take up (15%) and endline completion rate (70%) in order to have enough power for an effect size of 20% of a standard deviation of estimated soft skills measure, assuming we have two observations of soft skills (for power of 80% and significance of 5%). For job finding rates, we will have more data since we rely on administrative data.
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
INSEAD Institutional Review Board on Human Participants Research
IRB Approval Date
2023-01-06
IRB Approval Number
2022-93
Analysis Plan

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