Evidence for Impact: Promising Results from Skills and Career Confidence Survey among Youths in the Philippines

About a year ago, SkillLab and the Education Development Center (EDC) renewed their partnership in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded, Opportunity 2.0 (O2) project. The project aims to provide 180,000 out-of-school youth in 15 cities with second chance-education that leads to their successful employment and livelihoods. 

SkillLab’s digital solution was implemented alongside EDC’s Work Ready Now (WRN) training to support at least 5,000 out-of-school youth gain career confidence. O2 Master Trainers trained Local Service Providers and Department of Education Alternation Learning System (DepEd ALS) Teachers, enabling them to facilitate training for multiple schools and implementing partners. Youth learners gained new work readiness skills to increase their chances in the labor market. Part of the training was skills-based CV building, where they use SkillLab to discover their skills and create their CVs.

Positive Result from Preliminary Survey

In December 2023, the O2 team and SkillLab jointly developed a survey that was distributed to the young participants of the program. Our goal is to measure the impact of skills assessment and CV building using SkillLab's digital solution on their job readiness. In total, we collected unique responses from 210 youth (15-24 years old) from at least 12 organizations that had the opportunity to successfully use SkillLab in the program. At least 165 young people had already completed their skills profiles, while the rest were actively updating them. 

Their responses to SkillLab's impact tracking survey questions have an average positive rating of 86%. For example, 87% of respondents felt more confident in their ability to start or improve their career after using SkillLab. 87% of young people also agree that the resume they downloaded from SkillLab helped them communicate their skills. At the time of the survey, 44 of these young learners were working and 64% of them said that SkillLab helped them to get their current job.

The detailed results of SkillLab's impact tracking survey questions are shown in the table below:

The Project’s Current State and Its Future

After the preliminary survey, the project continues with more organizations and creative set-ups to reach and support more youth. Aside from integrating it into existing job readiness programs, the O2 team also brought the SkillLab application to many youth development and pre-job fair preparation events in different cities in the Philippines. At these events, job-seeking youth were able to try out the SkillLab application at a booth, create their skills profile, and download their CV before attending a career fair. At the time of this writing, SkillLab has been used by 23 organizations and 18 youth development sessions with 2,374 youth.

By the end of the project in February 2025, we aim to provide this digital support to 5000 young people. At the same time, a discussion is taking place to implement the SkillLab platform as digital career support in a more sustainable way beyond the project.