Soft versus Hard Skills in Entrepreneurial Success: Evidence from Post-Secondary Entrepreneurship Training Interventions in Uganda

Business and labor market successes are thought to depend on a series of economic/business "hard" skills and social-emotional "soft" skills. Soft skills include self-regulation, self-actualization, communication, win-win judgment, persona power, negotiation, leadership, team building, goal setting, decision making, risk taking, social networking, and public speaking. Hard skills, taught in existing entrepreneurship programs, focus on skills such as accounting, finance, and strategy. The goals of this project are to understand (1) the types of skills needed for successful entrepreneurship, (2) whether those skills can be taught, and (3) the effectiveness of skills for females versus males. We propose to evaluate an intervention that experimentally strengthened the training of these skills in Ugandan entrepreneurship programs in high schools. The intervention also included a module on life planning, including the relationship between fertility and work. This research will shed light on the relative contribution of hard versus soft skills in predicting successful entrepreneurship, business success, labor market outcomes, and fertility particularly among women.