Are Soft Skills Enough? Experimental Evidence on Skill Complementarity for College Graduates

We study how complementarities in skill may affect the returns to vocational training using a randomized controlled trial in Cairo, Egypt. Participants, who were college-educated, were either given a 4-week training in soft skills (e.g., grooming, time management), technical skills (e.g., Microsoft programs, English language), or a mix of the two (half of each). We find large differences in outcomes between the three treatments. The technical and mixed treatments do best in the short term, raising first-job income by about 15%, relative to both a control group and the soft-skill treatment. In the longer term, the mixed-skill treatment significantly outperforms the other two treatments, giving participants 20-27% higher income. The high returns for this group seem to come from climbing the job ladder to access jobs that require speaking English, which may be at higher-quality employers. Overall, the results suggest that curriculum details play an important role in the outcomes of vocational training programs and that leveraging skill complementarity can yield tangible benefits