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

This study seeks to investigate (i) how barriers in access to information affect search efforts, labor outcomes and aspirations of young jobseekers taking their first step in the job market, (ii) how can career-coaching and job search assistance from “the future you” help influencing their expectations and labor market trajectories and (iii) how does the trainees’ degree of identification with “the future you” affect the way in which they interpret somebody else’s experience with respect to their own future. The experimental setting is that of Vocational Training Institutes (VTIs) in Uganda and “the future you” is an alumnus of the VTI, who successfully entered the labor market after receiving the training.