Evidence and Research on Youth Employment, Evidence into Action ·
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What Works: testing youth employment interventions ·
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Summarising evidence on effective youth employment interventions.
View toolYouth Futures Foundation commissioned the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, the Institute for Employment Studies and Monash University to synthesise existing evidence on active labour market programmes (ALMPs).
The aim was to assess the impact of individual components of ALMPs on employment, education and training outcomes for young people (aged 15-35) in high-income countries, compared to service as usual.
The report presents insights on 15 individual components, across a range of quantitative outcomes. The findings substantially extend the range of measures and outcomes covered in the Youth Employment Toolkit.
The review draws on several high-quality reviews to identify eligible studies published between 1990 and October 2023:
Supplementary searches screened grey literature.
The approach is designed to maximise the number of studies that could be include in analysis while minimising any bias that it introduced.
Studies where the comparison group is provided with usual services, no intervention, other services, or wait-list control.
Studies were not required to include a usual services arm; studies directly comparing two or more eligible ALMP components or component combinations were eligible.
Studies that reported a quantitative measure of:
See pages 55-57 for further details.
The structure and definitions of these components build on those underpinning the Puerto et al (2022) systematic review of the Impact of Active Labour Market Programmes on Youth Employment.
See Table 16 on pages 23-32 for full intervention and component definitions.
See Table 18 on page 41 for more detail.
The review uses a multivariate hierarchical Bayesian component network meta-analysis (CNMA).
The method used offers an account of the probability of each level of impact, as well as a ‘headline’ median estimate.
The actual identified impact of any programme depends on how and when it is implemented, and the approach to evaluation.
See pages 50-51 for further details on interpretation.
Here we present an overview of key findings by headline outcomes. For full component-specific analysis view the full report.
The median impacts on employment, education and training that are associated with the components are mostly low or moderate. This is in line with the first edition of the Youth Employment Toolkit and other international meta-analyses.
Reported impacts are associated with individual components of youth employment programmes.
To estimate the possible impact of a programme on any outcome, users can add the impacts of all the components that it includes.
Basic skills training and financial assistance are associated with ‘moderate’ median impact on employment between 12 and 24 months after starting an intervention (‘recent employment’).
Wage subsidies and employment coaching are associated with a median impact in the ‘low positive’ range.
The evidence for associated impacts on NEET at 24 months after starting an intervention is mostly ‘emerging’ (very few evaluations measure this outcome).
Off-the-job training, job search preparation, employment coaching and unpaid work experience are associated with the moderate or high median impacts, on the basis of this limited evidence.
On-the-job training and wage subsidies are associated with median impacts in the ‘low positive’ range.
Behavioural skills training, off-the-job training and wage subsidies are associated with median impacts in the ‘moderate positive’ or ‘high positive’ ranges for attaining a Level 2 qualification (‘school completion’).
Soft skills training, unpaid work experience and financial assistance are associated with median impacts in the ‘low positive’ range.
Off-the-job training is associated with a ‘moderate positive’ median impact across a range of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) outcomes.
Basic skills training, soft skills training, behavioural skills training, on-the-job training, financial assistance and job search preparation associated with a ‘low positive’ median impact on TVET outcomes.
Behavioural, ‘soft’ and basic skills training, off-the-job training and on-the-job training, and basic skills training are associated with positive median impacts across several work quality measures.
Other interventions are associated positive median impacts on individual aspects of work quality.
Median impacts may be higher for ‘older’ young people for off-the-job training, wage subsidies, ‘soft’ skills training, employment counselling, job search assistance, job search preparation, and financial assistance.
Median impacts may be higher for ‘younger’ young people for basic skills training.
The current findings represent a foundation from which more granular analyses can be developed.
There is significant scope to use the existing network to explore impacts for different socio-demographic groups and test specific hypotheses regarding the interaction between components.
The stability of these estimates remains to be tested against critical moderators including macro-economic contexts such as business cycle dynamics.
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