Job readiness without market alignment won't deliver impact

By Caterina Valero, Sr. Advisor for Youth Livelihoods, ChildFund

Over the years, I’ve seen the same story play out across different countries. In Haiti, the Philippines and Tanzania, thousands of young people have been trained in jewelry making, artisan crafts, and other vocational skills. The training programs are well-run and participants graduated with real, practical skills. The problem isn’t the quality of the training. It is that too many people have been trained to produce the same products for a small market. The result? Too many jewelers, too few buyers, zero income.

This is the predictable result of a design flaw that runs across the youth livelihoods sector. Building programs around what is easy to teach instead of what employers, buyers or markets actually need results in a certificate but not a sustainable livelihood. For too long, young people have been trained for jobs that didn’t exist. Fortunately, the sector is now catching up to what the evidence has shown for years: Skills training alone doesn’t deliver impact.

Asking the wrong question

Training programs often start with the question, “What existing training can we offer?” The question that should be asked and that will determine whether a young person earns an income after the training is “Who is hiring or buying, and for what?” These are very different starting points – one supply driven, the other demand driven. Each determines the skills that are needed and leads to different programs and outcomes.

At ChildFund, we’ve been moving from fragmented training delivery to a more integrated, systemic approach that starts with the market, not the classroom. What this means in practice is that labor market analysis and private sector engagement come first. We identify verified demand from employers and markets in a community before a single training session is designed. Then we shape the training to meet that specific, confirmed need. Across our country offices, we’ve been upgrading the technical and life skills curricula to ensure training holds up to quality assurance once tied to real jobs. The goal isn’t for young people to complete a training course but to match each of them with a job or a viable enterprise at the end of the training.

I saw this in practice during a trip to Uganda. Alpha, a young man who trained through Kampala Area Federation of Communities (KAFOC), one of our local partners, now owns and runs a car repair shop that is doing quite well. He represents the kind of outcome we want to see more of: not a certificate on a wall but a thriving business. Alpha’s path was entrepreneurship, which is also the outcome for many young people in trades like jewelry making and tailoring – a reminder that the model must serve both  job placement and self-employment.

It’s important to conduct a thorough career planning session with young people to identify their career interests and match them with trending employable options. This enables them to join vocations by choice and not by chance and clearly determines sustainability of their enterprises. Alpha’s entrepreneurship path was greatly shaped by the fact that he had an opportunity to undergo mindset change sessions that aligned positively to his strategic investment path rather than the unsustainable “get rich quick” options which may be attractive to youth. Alpha’s success showed me that the training he received was effective. It also showed how much we can achieve when training is part of a broader, market-driven system: a comprehensive, holistic approach that includes market analysis, tailored curricula, technical and life skills, wraparound services, and job placement or market linkages. This is the approach we are now testing in Sri Lanka, Bolivia and Sierra Leone.

So, what is the pushback?

The most common pushback I hear is that the integrated approach costs more than standard training delivery. And that is true. However, that comparison leaves out the real cost of the status quo: fully funded training pipelines that generate no income, no return on donors’ investment, and a generation of young people who no longer trust the next program that shows up offering a course.

This shift comes at the right time. Major bilateral donors are moving toward impact frameworks that demonstrate income generation after training. The ILO is projecting increases in youth unemployment across low- and middle-income countries. The sector needs a model that can stand up to that kind of pressure. The metric we need to track is what happens to a young person’s income six months to one year after the training ends, not how many young people participated in or completed the training.

It’s time to begin with the end in mind: the market. Job readiness connected to market access creates impact. We owe young people more than a skill they can’t use. We owe them access to a market that is waiting for them and that they are prepared to enter, especially as we equip young people for the workforce of the future.