Dinorah Singer
Experta en educación en CAF
Not only has primary and secondary education in Latin America reached nearly 100 percent of its inhabitants, but the proportion of people entering the labor market with a high school degree has gone from 35 to 55 percent between 1990 and 2010, while the average schooling years of workers have increased from 8.2 to 10.2 over the same period.
However, employers still do not seem to find a direct correlation between such achievements and their own gains in terms of remuneration, satisfaction and productivity, and lament their employees’ lack of skills.
Why is there a gap between job training and labor market demands in Latin America? One of the answers could be that, in addition to traditional basic education - which offers fundamental academic training in literature, mathematics and the like - it is also necessary for students to acquire and reinforce other skills relevant to their future career (see chart 1).
Cognitive and socio-emotional skills analytical framework
Data increasingly shows that workers need more than just a knowledge-related education to get a well-paying job. Employers also greatly value socio-emotional skills (summarized in the figure above), including honesty and accountability, as well as the capacity of individuals to work as a team, communicate effectively, recover from adverse situations (resilience), manage their emotions, be responsible and honest, among others.
Technical knowledge and advanced cognitive skills are no longer enough tobe competitive in the job market. In fact, they are not even the most important skills employers seek in candidates, according to surveys conducted in various regions of the world (see Figure 2). When asked about the skills they find most lacking among their employees, employers consistently point to socio-emotional skills.
Top employer-rated skills worldwide
Although evidence shows that socio-emotional skills are a growing concern among employers, large-scale efforts to incorporate them in school curricula are still scarce.
To make up for this situation, CAF has added the issue of developing socio-emotional skills to its work order, as it has noticed an increase in awareness in the region’s countries.
The institution is a member of the Regional Cooperation Task Force for Cross-Cutting and Socio-Emotional Skills (MESACTS), intended as a technical space for cooperation to collect, analyze and promote initiatives and discussions that can serve as a basis for incorporating cross-cutting and socio-emotional skills into public policies.
MESACTS has initiated an exchange between government representatives and public entities from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, through a virtual platform in which users may access shared information and the introduction of a cycle of workshops on topics related to cross-cutting and socio-emotional skills, as well as their incorporation into qualification frameworks, the best way to measure them and the cross-sectoral articulation to be rolled out for countries to coordinate joint actions that strengthen training.
Based on such workshops, CAF has identified a few interest areas for countries and plans to ramp up its participation, particularly in the design and implementation of a measuring tool and the generation of cross-sectoral articulation mechanisms, as a contribution to strengthening training in these abilities relevant to the integral development of Latin Americans.
