Positive impact of Passport to Success life skills on learners

Youth unemployment is a global challenge that is particularly relevant to the South African labour market. The National Development Plan highlights concerns surrounding youth unemployment in the South African economy and recent Labour Force survey data indicates that youth unemployment is significantly higher than the overall unemployment rate.

The International Youth Foundation (IYF) is dedicated to improving youth economic opportunities. In their most recent country strategy for South Africa, IYF committed to strengthening learnerships and internships to help bridge the skills gap between young people’s abilities and the competencies that employers seek.

Their plan is to leverage existing learnership systems, such as those run through industry partners and Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges, and strengthen them by integrating their Passport to Success® (PTS) life skills curriculum to improve learnership completion rates and post-learnership employment rates. IYF has piloted this strategy in partnership with Proserv, a subsidiary of the IT company EOH, by integrating the PTS curriculum into the EOH Youth Job Creation Initiative.

IYF partnered with Genesis to conduct a rigorous impact evaluation of the PTS life skills curriculum provided to learners participating in the EOH Youth Job Creation Initiative. The purpose of this evaluation was to generate evidence around the impact of PTS integration for both businesses and the participating youth. This evidence serves to address the significant knowledge gap that exists with respect to life skills training/non-cognitive skills development and employment outcomes for youth.

The evaluation found that receiving the PTS life skills curriculum as part of the pre-learnership work readiness training had a positive impact on learners’ non-cognitive skills, across many categories, including listening, solving problems, goal setting, and the desire to lead, amongst others. Most importantly, PTS resulted in youth being approximately 20% more likely to be employed six months post-learnership, suggesting that the PTS curriculum is preparing learners to perform better in the workplace.