Soft Skills for the Unemployed

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 (Ple Emploi, 2018). To address this issue, the French unemployment agency, Ple 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 Ple 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.