Soft skills and Youth Employment: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

Soft skills are widely believed to matter for labor market success, but two questions remain central to their use in active labor-market policy: are they malleable beyond childhood, and can training in these skills improve employment outcomes? To address these, we evaluate CareerX, a one-month soft-skills and career-readiness program for university students in Bangladesh. Across 15 cohorts, 1,794 applicants were randomly assigned to an offer of training or a control group. One to two months after, training improves employment and paid employment by 7.3% and 6.7% in the treatment group. One year later, the estimated effect is similar in magnitude but less precisely estimated. An index of self-reported soft skills is 0.10 SD higher shortly after the program and remains higher, by 0.13 SD, one year later with larger gains in intrapersonal than interpersonal skills. Other measures such as CV quality, professional references and job-search planning and effort do not change detectably, a pattern consistent with improvements in soft skills contributing to the observed employment effects. The program is delivered at low marginal cost through group sessions and hybrid instruction at approximately USD 117 per additional attendee employed. Our results indicate that soft skills remain malleable at the point of labor market entry and that short programs can shift early employment outcomes at a cost well below comparable interventions.