By María Victoria Ojea*

Despite the increase of schooling, the Latin American workforce needs to keep on developing cognitive and socioemotional skills.

When writing your resume, did you ever think of putting on the top features such as “punctual”, “creative”, or “efficient”? Employers in Latin America are at a breaking point. They are no longer looking just for years of experience and degrees. They also look for candidates with specific skills to properly perform in everyday situations.

However, our parents, teachers and even economic theory, insist on telling us that reaching a high education level is a winning ticket to get quality jobs, earn good salaries and achieve professional success. Just like the rest of the world, Latin America subscribes to that belief.

In fact, over the past two decades, the region has experienced an amazing growth in terms of access to primary and secondary school. But, in many cases, the growth of schooling has not delivered the benefits expected.

From 1990 to 2010, the proportion of people aged from 20 to 24 years old who completed secondary school and accessed the labour market went from 35% to 55%, while the average schooling years of the workforce went from 8.2 in 1990 to 10.2 in 2010.

But, according to different studies developed up to this date, the benefits of attaining superior levels of education have actually gone down in most Latin American countries during the past 20 years. Furthermore, workers in the region have not really improved their productivity.

In addition, employers from all over the world, including Latin America, regret the lack of adequate skills in current and potential employees. Besides, despite the exponential economic growth of the first decade of 2000, which was driven mostly by the boom of commodities, experts agree on the fact that the region could have had a more dynamic growth by improving its productivity and competitiveness levels. One of the causes that prevented that from happening is the lack of proper human capital.

The current regional scenario shows a mixture of low economic growth and a progressively more sophisticated demand from the labour market.  In a world where the creation of new jobs is scarce and competition grows, a new report from the World Bank called “Minds and Behavior at Work: Boosting Socioemotional Skills for Latin America’s Workforce” points out that improving workers’ socioemotional and cognitive skills so they can adapt to the new environment and improve labour productivity is a top priority.

“My son, the doctor” versus “My son, the creative”

 But, what are these skills that employers are looking for?

A resume, or even a job interview seem like poor tools to express the true skills a person has. As the World Bank states, advance cognitive skills are those linked to the mental capacity to understand, think, and learn; they include basic academic knowledge, critical thinking and problem solving, among others. Socioemotional skills include honesty, ethics, teamwork, perseverance, punctuality, creativity and responsibility, among others.

Data obtained for the study in Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador and Peru, proves that adults with superior levels of cognitive or socioemotional skills are linked to better results in the labour market (such as higher wages) and more chances  of going through tertiary education, compared to those who have lower skills levels.

In Latin America, socioemotional skills are closely linked to the probability of getting a job, while cognitive skills are more important to get a job that pays better (a similar situation to what happens in OECD countries).

A possible explanation is that lots of jobs in Latin America are informal and low quality; these jobs may demand less cognitive skills, but, even in these cases, socioemotional skills are important.

In the region, cognitive skills are linked with formal jobs and with having a highly qualified occupation, while socioemotional skills show a more modest correlation with these results, partly because of their multiplicity. Nevertheless, among less educated workers, socioemotional skills seem even more relevant to get a better job that among more educated workers.

As a matter of fact, the report also points out that, when asking employers what are the most important gaps in terms of skills, the most important ones are socioemotional skills (51%), followed by advanced cognitive skills (29%), technical capacities (16%) and, lastly, basic cognitive skills (4%).

How can emotions be taught?

Even though the development of cognitive skills has been studied in more detail, according to the report, little is known about the teaching of emotional skills during childhood, teenage years and the beginning of adulthood.

The study shows that “skills training is an accumulative process”. As they are affected by the environment and investments, socioemotional skills’ development programs can be better implemented during specific life cycles. Three factors must be considered when designing socioemotional development programs. Firstly, the kid’s age in terms of psychological, neurobiological and social preparation to learn and practice concepts. Just like very young kids are not ready to read, they are not ready to develop skills to solve social problems until they have the necessary psychosocial structure needed for empathy.

For that reason, there is growing proof that these skills can be taught in classrooms, particularly during primary school. “They can come from teachers who show behaviours they learned themselves, in a positive and safe school environment that promotes and rewards positive socioemotional behaviours, teaching methods that use socioemotional skills in the learning process, or specific study programs that teach these skills”, says the report.

In addition, it claims that “for both, teenagers at school as those with no schooling, extracurricular activities have proven to be useful, just like those programs that combine labour training with socioemotional skills training. International evidences show that these skills are taught in existing institutions.”

Nonetheless, the authors say that the main challenge is to organize the actors involved and the pedagogic options to do it, preparing Latin American workers to improve productivity and be successful.

* María Victoria Ojea is online producer at the World Bank.