Speaker
Description
Young people lacking job-qualifying skill formation are likely to face precarious labor market conditions in the future. This might be particularly the case for youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and young women facing rigid gender norms at risk of not entering the labor force. Career guidance prior to making major career choices has the potential to alleviate these risks. We examine whether and how a low-cost 10-hour long career guidance program implemented during school hours can facilitate career choices as well as labor market entry in the future. Our results from a school-level clustered randomized controlled trial ($n>5000$) in urban India with primarily female students in the final grade of 45 secondary schools show that the program increases the share of students pursuing further skill formation and encourages students to consider their interests as the most important criterion for the selection of their career path.
