Job Search Skills and Labor Market Outcomes in Tanzania: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

The transition from school to work is a critical stage in a young person's life, as it determines future career success, personal growth, and overall quality of life. However, many new entrants to the labor market lack essential job search and soft skills, which delays their transition into the workplace and diminishes the quality of job matches. The role of these skills in facilitating transitions into the labor market in developing countries is limited and largely unexplored. We propose an intervention to assess the impact of job search skills training combined with job placement on individuals' job search efforts and prospects of entering the labor market (matching) in a randomized controlled setting. Thus, the central research question this study sets out to address is whether job search skills training and placements enhance matching within the context of a developing country. The intervention will target recent college graduates as potential new market entrants by randomly assigning them to training and job placement, and a control group. The study aims to contribute to the literature on the effectiveness of job search skills and placements that will have important policy implications for designing effective labor market policies to support youth transitions into the workforce in developing countries, specifically in Tanzania.