Soft skills training leads to success

Soft skills training can help people get and keep jobs, improve performance at work, and increase business profits—but design matters.

Training workers and job-seekers in both hard skills and soft skills are important. To improve career success, productivity, and entrepreneurship, donors and policymakers should support programs that promote soft skills and/or mix them with hard skills training.

Illustration of a woman speaking into a microphone with an audience

Soft skills training is a worthwhile investment for businesses. Integrating soft skills into employee and management training programs can boost productivity and retention, potentially enough to quickly recover employers’ costs of providing the training.

Design curriculum and implementation thoughtfully to lead to greater impact. Training providers should identify which soft skills matter most in their context and design effective curricula for the targeted group of people, like workers in specific occupations or industries, young entrepreneurs, or self-employed women. While cost-effectiveness varies widely, tailored soft skills programs for frontline workers and managers have shown particularly strong returns.

Workers and business owners often face challenges that go beyond technical know-how, like time management, dealing with setbacks, and leading teams. In low- and middle-income countries, productivity tends to be lower than in high-income countries. Many solutions focus on technical training, and soft skills are often overlooked—but they play an important role in helping workers and managers do their jobs well. Training that improves workers’ productivity or how well managers run their teams can improve people’s skills and incomes, and overall business performance.

Training programs focused on soft skills—like communication, grit, and problem-solving—often help workers thrive and can deliver strong returns for businesses. Across three studies, people looking for jobs were more likely to secure steady, paid work after finishing soft skills programs, particularly when combined with hard skills training. At a large manufacturing firm in India, providing soft skills training to factory workers and managers boosted productivity enough to pay for the training itself several times over. Small business owners who received soft skills training also earned higher profits.

Soft skills programs can be especially effective for women at work. For women entrepreneurs, cultural restrictions and domestic obligations can limit the time and resources they can devote to running their businesses. A program in Kenya that focused on empowerment contents like women’s self-confidence and decision making power helped women overcome barriers such as norms restricting women in business and competing household responsibilities, leading to increased sales and profits. In Togo, teaching personal initiative to women entrepreneurs benefited women more than men.

Soft skills merit a more central role in workforce and entrepreneurship programs. Research suggests a complementarity between soft skills training and hard skills focused on technical knowledge. Combining this training in some jobs programs shows promise for helping workers find work and stay employed in the long-term. In Egypt, for example, training that mixed soft and hard skills led to better employment outcomes than programs that focused on either soft skills or hard skills.

The Evidence

Policy Insight: A review of 21 studies on workplace interventions to improve wo…

Policy Insight: A review of 28 studies on training microentrepreneurs

Policy Insight: A review of 28 studies on vocational and skills training

Evaluation Summary: Improving Productivity Through Soft Skills Training for Fem…

Paper: Impacts of Managerial Soft Skills Training

Paper: Lasting Impacts of Personal Initiative Training

"We saw substantial improvements in soft skills like collaboration and teamwork and those skills translated into greater productivity… They generate quite a lot of improvement by working together with the folks on the line with them, by collaborating, by speaking up.”

—Achyuta Adhvaryu, J-PAL affiliate and Good Business Lab co-founder

Cost and design considerations

The most effective soft skills training initiatives for workers and entrepreneurs have paid for themselves. A review found that when training was delivered to workers and microentrepreneurs, the increased productivity and profits that followed meant that costs were recouped over the span of 0-2 years on average. In India, Gap Inc. implemented a soft skills training program for frontline workers at one of its supplier factories, which generated returns of over 250% for the firm in less than a year. In the same company, managers were also trained on soft skills, and productivity gains were estimated to be 54 times the program's cost. Among self-employed and small business owners in Togo, a personal initiative training led to lasting higher profits, with an estimated return of over 900 percent on the cost of training over seven years, as this approach helped small businesses to grow without needing extra cash or equipment.

The costs and benefits of more general business skills training programs can vary greatly based on the components included and the mode of training. J-PAL's preliminary cost effectiveness analysis suggests that for business training targeted to entrepreneurs covering broad technical topics like financial and management practices, costs can range from a few dollars per trainee to several hundred dollars. Similarly, impacts ranged from having no impact on income to improving monthly income by more than $100 per month. As a result, there is substantial variation in the returns of business skills training programs, particularly since more expensive programs did not necessarily yield higher returns.

Digital training holds potential to be scalable and effective, but cost savings from providing digital rather than in-person or classroom training may not be straightforward. Online delivery can reduce some expenses, such as venue and transportation, but trainer pay often makes up a large portion of program costs—and higher-quality trainers may command higher fees. In Mexico, digital training also faced unexpected scaling challenges because class sizes were constrained by the need to match participants to shared schedules. These limitations are especially relevant for training programs targeted at microentrepreneurs and job seekers, who may not have regular schedules.

Higher worker productivity helps firms and entrepreneurs recoup training costs.

Implementing partners

Implementers bring on-the-ground experience, cultural context, and delivery capacity to training programs. From youth employment initiatives to entrepreneurship training, these organizations translate research insights into scalable programs. Many implementing partners also play a key role in testing innovative models like soft skills programs while remaining committed to ongoing evaluation and learning. These include the following (listed in alphabetical order); this list is not exhaustive.

Initiatives combining public and private sector efforts have played a key role in piloting, testing, and expanding soft skills training in low- and middle-income countries. Multi-stakeholder groups like the Better Work program from the International Labor Organization and International Finance Corporation, and major employers such as Shahi Exports, have embedded soft skills into workforce development strategies, often in partnership with researchers and international donors. These efforts blend commercial goals with a focus on improving worker well-being, retention, and productivity, and have helped demonstrate the value of soft skills. Low- and middle-income country governments have also played a key role by incorporating soft skills into vocational training curricula reform.

The role of foreign assistance and philanthropy

Philanthropy and foreign assistance has played a critical role in researching the design and impact of soft skills programs. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, through the Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries initiative, funded the evaluation of Gap Inc.’s Personal Advancement & Career Enhancement (PACE) program, which aims to equip women in frontline manufacturing roles with soft skills.

Based on promising results, Shahi Exports, India’s largest apparel manufacturer and supplier to Gap Inc., partnered with researchers to evaluate and expand additional worker-focused interventions, including manager soft skills training and stronger worker voice channels. Shahi has since committed to scaling successful programs across its operations, with more than 86,000 women trained under PACE to date. Globally, Gap Inc. has expanded PACE to reach more than 715,000 women and girls across 17 countries.