Substitutability of Soft Skills Training for Baseline Skill Deficits
Economic models of dynamic human capital formation suggest that early non-cognitive skill deficits are difficult to remediate in adulthood due to dynamic complementarities requiring high baseline stocks.
Picture this
Think of building a tower with prefabricated structural blocks. Instead of needing a massive concrete foundation already in place to add more height, structured adult soft skills training acts as a custom support harness, yielding the largest height gain for the towers that were previously the shortest and least supported.
What the evidence says
Productivity gains were significantly higher for workers with low baseline leadership skills (-4.3 percentage point differential for high baseline leaders, p < 0.05) and those without education above primary school (-7.59 percentage point differential for higher education, p < 0.10), proving adult soft skills training acts as a substitute for baseline skill stocks.
- Who
- N = 2,703 female garment workers (258,285 daily worker observations for heterogeneity estimations) in Bengaluru, India.
- How
- Two-stage randomized controlled trial (RCT) with interaction terms for HR-rated baseline leadership tiers (top 2 vs bottom 2 of 4 levels), educational attainment, and technical machine operator status.
What to do
Target enterprise soft skills training programs preferentially to frontline employees identified as lacking baseline leadership or formal education to maximize marginal productivity returns.
From the source
"We find that training is most impactful for those workers identified by factory HR representatives to be lacking in leadership skills at baseline, indicating that training in soft skills was a substitute rather than a complement for baseline stocks of skill."
Returns_to_On_the_job_Soft_Skills_Training_Adhvarya_Kala_Nyshadham.pdf