Funded by IPA's Entrepreneurship and Private Sector Development Program, researchers are collaborating with IPA Uganda and Talents Enabling Uganda (TEU) to determine whether a self-reporting or a scenario-based soft skill assessment tool can predict which young people entering employment are likely to succeed in the workplace. Both assessment formats are aligned with the Employability Skills Training, Evaluation, and Measurement (ESTEEM) framework developed by the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab and IPA. Results will be available in 2027.

The Challenge

In sub-Saharan Africa, young people face significant barriers to finding and keeping formal employment, in part stemming from mismatches between their skills and what employers require.¹ This challenge is present in Uganda, where approximately 700 thousand young people enter the job market each year, and more than 40 percent of people aged 18 to 30 are neither employed nor in training.² Governments and organizations have invested in programs designed to help young people develop the soft skills employers look for, such as communication, teamwork, and emotional regulation. However, without a reliable way to measure whether young people have actually developed these skills, it is difficult to know who is ready for work and who needs more support before they find employment.

Soft skills assessment tools offer a potential way to identify job-ready youth. Yet the tools currently in use were developed and validated primarily in high-income countries,³ and whether they accurately measure competencies in African contexts remains largely untested. If assessments do not meaningfully capture skills in this setting, programs may be placing young people in jobs that are a poor fit. This not only limits the chances of young people finding lasting employment, but also makes it harder for the programs designed to help them to demonstrate and improve their impact.

The Assessment Frameworks

Two soft skills assessment approaches are being compared in this study. The standard assessment asks young people to rate themselves on a set of workplace skills. The enhanced assessment instead presents realistic workplace scenarios and asks respondents how they would handle them, an approach that may reduce social desirability bias. Both cover the same five domains of the Employability Skills Training, Evaluation, and Measurement (ESTEEM) framework developed by IPA and the World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab: communication, teamwork, problem-solving, emotional regulation, and initiative.

The assessments take 25 to 30 minutes to complete on a tablet and are administered before job placement. Instruments are adapted following International Test Commission guidelines, including forward-backward translation and cognitive interviewing to ensure cultural appropriateness. Youth then remain in their placement roles, where supervisors provide independent performance evaluations at 90 and 180 days, with peer evaluations collected at 90 days.

The Research

In collaboration with Talents Enabling Uganda, researchers are assessing whether soft skills assessments can predict how well young people perform once they are in a job. The study involves 400 youth (200 males and 200 females) in Kampala and Wakiso entering formal employment through partner placement programs in the hospitality, construction, and agribusiness sectors, as well as other formal services. Youth receive one of two assessment approaches:

• Standard self-report assessment: Participants complete standard self-report items covering the five ESTEEM domains before job placement.
• Enhanced assessment: Participants complete behaviorally-anchored scenario-based items covering the same five domains before job placement.

After 90 and 180 days on the job, supervisors independently rate each participant’s performance, with colleague evaluations collected at 90 days. The research team, led by Global Health Economics (GHE) Consulting, will then analyze whether higher scores on either assessment are associated with stronger performance and longer retention.

Results

Results will be available in 2027.

Sources

^1. Mastercard Foundation, “Africa Youth Employment Outlook 2026,” Mastercard Foundation, February 10, 2026, https://mastercardfdn.org/en/our-research/africa-youth-employment-outlook-2026/

^2. UBOS. (2024). National Population and Housing Census 2024. Uganda Bureau of Statistics

^3. Kankaraš, Miloš. "Personality Matters: Relevance and Assessment of Personality Characteristics. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 157." OECD Publishing (2017).

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