Trainees who had prior experience and were using Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) programs to gain further skills enjoyed the largest improvement in labor market outcomes. In designing training programs MCC should consider investments in both pre-service and in-service training. Compared to pre-training earnings, trainees who were employed at baseline increased their monthly earnings by about 10 percent, while the subset of trainees who returned to the same job they held before training increased their monthly earnings by 21 percent. Trainees who had more than two years of prior work experience obtained full-time, course-relevant jobs at about double the rate of those with less experience. This suggests that employers in course-relevant fields may have had substantially less demand for Program Improvement Competitive Grants course graduates who did not also have meaningful prior work experience. This demonstrates that in the Georgia context, employers regard TVET programs as a valuable way to upskill existing workers. Not only can in-service training for existing employees have potentially greater initial impact – employers are more likely to contribute to or entirely finance this kind of training. This can be an important revenue source for TVET providers contributing to overall financial sustainability of programs. MCC is addressing this lesson by considering both in-service and pre-service training in Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, and Kosovo.
Lesson Learned