Meet Your Future: Job Search Effort and Aspirations of Young Jobseekers

We implement a field experiment involving 1100 current students and 700 alumni of five accredited Vocational Training Institutes (VTIs) in Eastern and Central Uganda.
All the students in the project receive, or have received, a two-years residential training at five formal VTIs, at the end of which a certificate of course completion is released. Training is provided on specific skills including motor mechanics, electrical engineering, plumbing, tailoring and hair-dressing.
In particular, we implement a coaching program in which students that are randomly assigned to the treatment group are matched with successful alumni who graduated from the same institute and course of study. As part of this program, we facilitate three career-coaching sessions between each student-alum pair to take place at the turn of training completion, right when the students are transitioning out of education and into the labor market.
During these sessions, students have the chance to ask questions and share their doubts and fears with the alumni. The alumni, previously trained by the research team, will share their personal experience, provide tips for a successful job search, and share contacts of potential employers and information on current openings, should they know of any. In addition to participating to the career-coaching program, half of the treated students in the program will also receive a small amount of cash intended to either facilitate further communication with the alum they are matched with or, more in general, to help them with their job search. In order to measure the impacts of the career-coaching program we collect survey data and set up a randomized control trial.

2021-02-01

2021-04-15

We define four domains of outcomes of interest: (i) labor market; (ii) existence and characteristics of network connection; (iii) job search strategy; (iv) expectations. The first domain contains our primary outcomes of interest while (ii), (iii) and (iv) are intermediate outcomes. If a primary outcome is missing for more than 10 percent of observations (not including attrition and skips), then we may not report it as a primary outcome. Likewise, if, for an indicator variable, more than 90 percent of responses take a single value, we will not include it as a primary outcome or as an index component.

Labor Market Performance
i. Employment (Number of offers; Monthly and total earnings; Hours worked; Time to first employment)
ii. Matching quality (Ability to keep job for at least 3 months; Job satisfaction)
iii. Quality of job (Permanent vs. Temporary vs. Casual; Wage Employment vs. Self-Employment; Formal vs. Informal; Received job by interview)

Our evaluation is based on a two-level randomization design. First, we randomize each student into T1 (30%), T2 (30%) or C (40%). We stratify our first randomization by: (i) gender, (ii) VTI, (iii) smartphone ownership and (iv) a “hard to find” dummy (which takes value 1 if the respondent was not found in any of the 3 pre-intervention rounds of survey). Then, we randomly assign students in T1 and T2 to a successful alum from their VTI and course. Each alum is matched to up to 5 students. Each treated student is matched with only one alum. The alumni to administer the career-coaching are selected so to ensure quality of the coaching as well as replicability of the program. Selection will be based on alumni’s: (i) availability; (ii) employment history; (iii) phone ownership (iv) age and time passed from graduation year; (v) graduation score and (vi) self reported soft skills.

Randomization will be performed by a computer

Student

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1100 students, 700 alumni

660 students will be matched to an alum and will participate to the career-coaching program. Half of them will additionally receive a small cash transfer (~2.5$). 440 students will be in the control group.