Meet Your Future: Job Search Effort and Aspirations of Young Jobseekers

This study investigates how barriers to information access, flawed expectations about the job market, and inefficient planning (in terms of job search or starting-up a business) affect labor outcomes of young jobseekers entering the job market. The experimental setting is that of Vocational Training Institutes (VTI) in Uganda. We track over two years 1180 VTI trainees to follow the evolution of their job market expectations and their strategies to approach the labor market. We examine how receiving search assistance and information about the job market from “the future you”, a successful alumnus of the VTI, affects their beliefs, search strategies, effort and labor market trajectories. Collecting detailed data on trainees’ network and background, we seek to explore whether the treatment improves equality in access to quality jobs. Do trainees from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit differently because they face additional frictions to start with? Are coaching and career services complements of or substitutes for network quality?