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Description of  Minds and Behaviors at Work: Boosting Socioemotional Skills for Latin America's Workforce (Directions in Development) (Directions in Development: Human Development)

Latin America has shown impressive growth in educational attainment over the past two decades but that education has failed to yield the expected benefits. A mounting body of research and policy debates suggests that the quantity of education is not an adequate metric of human capital acquisition. Rather, individuals skills what people actually know and can do should stand as policy targets and be fostered across the life cycle. Evidence from around the world suggests that employers require both cognitive and socioemotional skills and that both types of skills are associated with a range of positive employment and educational attainment outcomes. Minds and Behaviors at Work: Boosting Socioemotional Skills for Latin America s Workforce synthesizes original empirical research on the role of cognitive and socioemotional skills in shaping adults labor market outcomes in Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. This work is put in perspective with insights from similar studies in other Latin American countries and high-income countries. The findings show that cognitive skills matter for reaping labor market gains in terms of higher wages and job formality in Latin America but so do socioemotional skills. Moreover, socioemotional skills seem to have a particularly strong effect on labor force participation and tertiary education attendance as a platform to build knowledge. Minds and Behaviors at Work also presents a policy framework for developing skills by providing insights from developmental psychology about when people are neurobiologically, socioemotionally, and situationally ready to develop socioemotional skills and provides examples of interventions that combine socioemotional learning and cognitive development. This book will be of importance to policy makers, researchers, and anyone else interested in human development, from Latin America and beyond. In particular, this book will be most valuable for the curious minds wondering how our mental abilities and behaviors shape our education and employment trajectories, and how to foster these abilities along our lives. Read more