market effects are driven by informal employment and dissipate over the following year, as more jobs become available in the economy and the control group employment catches up with that of treated participants. We do see, however, that 15 months after the training, treated youth are more likely to have a permanent contract in the informal sector and to have informal jobs in the formal sector, indicating that the training might have helped them sustain their jobs but not switch to better jobs. Interestingly, we find large gender gaps in soft skills against women, consistent with a recent paper looking at gender gaps in soft skills for 17 African countries (Ajayi et al., 2022). However, we do not see significant effects of the training for either men or women on interpersonal or intrapersonal soft skills measured 15 months after the training, and there is no heterogeneity in the effects of the training by gender.

This paper makes three main contributions. First, we contribute to the growing experimental evidence base examining labor market impacts of soft-skills interventions (Acevedo et al., 2020; Adhvaryu et al., 2023; Allemand et al., 2023; Barrera-Osorio et al., 2020; Groh et al., 2016; Osman and Speer, 2022). The first four papers are different in focus and context, studying either on-thejob soft skills training, training combined with internships or vocational education, or focusing on low-educated samples.<sup>6</sup> Our study is more closely related to the last two papers. Groh et al. (2016) evaluate a 45-hour soft skills training for women community college graduates in Jordan, and do not find any significant employment impacts either in the short or medium term. Osman and Speer (2022) compare a 120-hour training program focused on soft skills (mainly on communication skills) with two programs, one focused on technical skills (English and software), and another one mixing soft and technical skills for recent college graduates in the Arab Republic of Egypt. They find that the program focused on soft skills does not improve labor market outcomes, whereas the program that combines soft and technical skills has larger effects on income and on the probability of finding better jobs (that require speaking English) even in the long run. One limitation of these two studies is that they do not have measures of soft skills, and thus they cannot test whether the lack of effects is observed even when soft skills are improved.<sup>7</sup> We can rule out significant effects of the training on an index of 14 soft-skill measures after 15

> 6Adhvaryu et al. (2023) study on-the-job soft skills training among Indian garment workers and find significant productivity gains, which they attribute to improved teamwork and collaboration, but no effects on wages or work retention. Acevedo et al. (2020) test the effects of internships combined with either vocational and soft skills training or only soft skills training for at-risk youth in Dominican Republic. They find lasting improvements in personal skills and expectations for women (stronger for the full treatment) and not for men, and improvements for labor market outcomes for women but only in the short run (similar for both treatments). Allemand et al. (2023) evaluate a training program focused on activating conscientiousness for construction workers in Senegal and find that it reduces job turnover. Barrera-Osorio et al. (2020) estimate the effects of two versions of vocational training emphasizing hard or soft skills for relatively poor vocational training students in Colombia. They find that the program focusing on technical skills does better at improving labor market outcomes in the short run, but that focusing on soft skills helps youth sustain employment over the longer term.

> 7Recent evidence has demonstrated that soft skills are malleable in different settings (Acevedo et al., 2020; Ashraf et al., 2020; Campos et al., 2017; Ubfal et al., 2022).

3