Original source
Returns to On-the-job Soft Skills Training (2019)
Research manuscript
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Used in these cards
Adult Non-Cognitive Personality Trait Malleability
"P.A.C.E. treatment does have a large positive and statistically significant impact on extraversion... supplemental propensity score-matched data reveal higher grit, openness, autonomy, and motivation among trained workers."
Autonomous Motivation Enhancement via Self-Determination Theory
"The six motivation measures are subscales of an 18 question motivation module meant to capture the different types of motivation emphasized in self-determination theory... We find large and significant impacts... including several measures of autonomous functioning and motivation."
Substitutability of Soft Skills Training for Baseline Skill Deficits
"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."
Soft Skill Enhanced Social Entitlement and Benefit Utilization
"The second category, availing oneself of government and employer-sponsored entitlement programs, is meant to evaluate changes in the effectiveness of information acquisition, another important soft skill."
Extraversion as a Behavioral Mediator of Soft Skill Productivity Gains
"Mediation analysis indicates that roughly 30% of the impact on productivity is due to increases in extraversion."
Firm Net Return on On-the-Job Soft Skills Training
"The net return to the firm was 258 percent eight months after program completion."
Goal-Setting Driven Intergenerational Educational Investment
"This result is consistent with a major theme in the training... personal goal setting, prioritizing actions in service of these goals, and mapping workplace motivation to the pursuit of these goals... in which saving for a child's education was explored as a specific example."
Intra-Production Line Soft Skill Productivity Spillovers
"Line level results are also consistent with individual-level results... we still find a significant productivity increase of roughly 8% of the mean."
Temporal Persistence Disproving Gift-Exchange Motivations in Workplace Training
"The time pattern of productivity impacts (i.e., small impacts during the program, and large impacts post-program completion) does not fit well with reciprocity as a primary mechanism..."
Complementarity of Soft Skills with Technical Skill Accumulation
"They are also more likely to proactively increase their stock of hard skills by requesting technical training and to be assigned to more complex tasks as a result, but exhibit greater productivity despite this assignment to more complex tasks."
Soft Skill Driven Promotion Expectations and Relative Performance Elevation
"Treatment workers are about 8.7 percentage points more likely to report that they expect a promotion within the next six months... and rate themselves higher relative to peer co-workers."
Task Complexity Reallocation via Standard Allowable Minutes
"Treated workers are more efficient after the program... despite being assigned to more complex tasks... SAM measures task complexity, and efficiency is actual pieces produced divided by target pieces."
External Market Unobservability of General Soft Skills
"Soft skills are largely unobserved in the hiring and wage-setting process in this setting and therefore are not priced into the wage... This imperfect information... among both current and future potential employers likely generates the observed difference in impacts of soft skills training on marginal productivity as compared to wage."