Workforce Development

Expanding access to quality and affordable education is a central element to eliminating extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity. In developing countries, private education providers play a critical role in the delivery of education, skills, and training that is affordable and relevant to the needs of the labor markets. The IFC education practice is developing several case studies that showcase success stories in the IFC education portfolio around scale, skills, and affordability.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with young women and men in rural and urban Brazil, this qualitative research explores gender dimensions in the causes and consequences of being ‘out of work and out of school.’ A key conclusion from this research is that this term (or the Portuguese: ‘nem-nem’) does not translate well the complex realities of this highly heterogeneous group.

Education and training systems have a vast potential to transform lives and contribute to economic growth. This potential can only be realized under a high-quality education and training services that comply with relevant standards. Persistently high unemployment, particularly among youth and young adults, high vacancies, and signs of over-education and under-utilization of individual skills suggest that education and training services are far from fulfilling their potential.

Funded under the Jobs Umbrella Multi-Donor Trust Fund, the World Bank launched an initiative to assess the key success factors for rapid technology skills training programs (in particular, coding bootcamps) and measure their impact on young people in terms of employment and employability. This initiative is specifically focused on exploring avenues to support upskilling, and thereby reducing unemployment problem in urban settings with traditionally large and growing young populations in developing countries.

Coding bootcamps are intensive short-term programs designed to train participants in programming skills to make them immediately employable. They combine characteristics of traditional vocational training programs with the intensity of military bootcamps for new recruits, intermingling socio emotional and tech skills learning in an intense and experiential manner, in what could be referred to as skills accelerators. The authors refer to coding bootcamps in this report as the ready-to-work model.

The skills for tomorrow’s Jobs in Bangladesh attempts to address key skills challenges and identifyopportunities in the backdrop of fast technological and economic changes. It proposes mid to long-term strategic policy options that would contribute to economic growth and job creation in Bangladesh with a focus on post-secondary education and skills development sectors. It aims to inform the Government and the World Bank’s jobs agenda.

The study reveals substantial vulnerabilities and exclusion of this population; key constraints toeducation, training, and employment; and insights for the design and delivery of programming to improve educational and labor market outcomes. It examines adolescent girls and young women’s overall inclusion as well as specific socioeconomic dimensions, including in education, employment, and agency.

The study benchmarks policies and practices in the community’s workforce development system against international good practices. Specifically, it assesses policies, practices and institutional arrangements, and identifies measures that contributed to workforce development. The study takes advantage of the World Bank’s workforce development diagnostic tool, which is part of the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) initiative.

This paper provides new cross-country evidence on the impact of cognitive skills, as measured by international achievement tests, on subsequent youth employment outcomes. High average scores are strongly associated with increases in school enrollment and reductions in the incidence of unemployment, with slightly stronger effects for women. Higher scores also correlate with a larger share of youth working in wage and salaried employment, outside of agriculture, and to some extent in higher status occupations, but these findings are less robust.