Providing training can help young people find jobs but, as one employment project in Tunisia shows, it can take more than skills to ensure long-term employment.
Ask governments or their development partners how to tackle youth unemployment and the answer often involves skills. Budgets go to studies of what employers need, then to new curricula built on those needs and stronger public vocational training systems to deliver them.
All of this prepares young people for work, but very little of it gets them into a job in the first place – or keeps them there. Research shows training works best when combined with placement support and close follow-up. That means finding young people for new opportunities, but also staying in contact with them once they are hired.
Training is necessary. But for young people who have been out of work for a long time, getting a job actually involves three steps: someone has to find them, prepare them and help them hold on to the job once hired.
Most pathways to work break down at the first and last steps. And those are also the steps public policy currently does the least to support. To tackle youth unemployment, governments and employers need to invest in the whole pathway into work. This means reaching young people, preparing them for available jobs and supporting them through their first weeks in employment.
Helping young people find jobs
In May 2025, FBR@WORK was launched as a results-based financing programme led by Tunisia's Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training, with support from the Swiss government and the Education Outcomes Fund.
Working with the government, hiring companies and employment service providers, the programme aims to get 1,500 young people in Tunisia who have been out of work for more than a year into permanent jobs. Like most programmes of this type, FBR@WORK was designed around a skills gap, but one year of implementation told a different story about how to get and keep young people in long-term employment.
Finding the young people came first. Firms recruiting at scale often don't ask for better-trained candidates, just candidates. An automotive supplier in Jendouba, in north-west Tunisia, for example, needed 700 operators quickly or it risked losing a major contract. It was ready to train them itself, but couldn’t find enough people to fill the vacancies. The bottleneck was not skills, but reaching potential workers at the speed and scale the employer needed.
Sourcing the right people also turned out to require more than a capable implementing partner. The same FBR@WORK implementing partner, using the same model, had very different results in two parts of the country, depending on how actively local authorities helped reach potential recruits.
In Jendouba, the governor's office, regional employment directorate, local employment offices and municipalities joined the mobilization, down to running door-to-door campaigns. The company eventually hired around 500 people, with more than 140 of them eligible for the youth unemployment programme.
In another local government area, however, cooperation stayed in meeting rooms, and no young person from the programme signed a permanent contract. Sourcing candidates works best as an ecosystem effort.
And when it came to training, one of FBR@WORK’s employment service providers planned 320 hours of training before young people could start work. But employers with jobs to fill found that even 100 hours of training was too long – they needed people to start work faster. To solve this, FBR@Work first allowed the young people to start work after 40 hours of training, then they participated in direct placements, with technical skills learned on the job.
Training was mandatory, but shorter and focused on the soft skills that help young people stay in work and reduce turnover for the firm.
Helping young people keep jobs
The signature on a hiring contract is not the finish line. New hires must keep the job. Some young people lose their jobs within weeks, perhaps because no one guides them, instructions contradict each other or an informal trial month ends without a contract.
When one of FBR@WORK’s employment service providers asked new recruits about training, it found that many young people placed in a new vacancy found their training matched the job, but some reported problems – mostly around lack of support or relations with managers. These young people need support from their first day, with an employment service provider staying in touch to help resolve problems with the employer over time.
In Tunisia, regulation allows public funding for training jobseekers and for technical or skills training during a recruit’s first year in work. But training after hiring is different from onboarding support. It should involve helping new employees settle in, navigate workplace expectations and resolve any problems with their employer. The regulation makes no equivalent provision for this support or for sourcing potential recruits.
The state already pays for the skills, but not for the rest of the pathway. Tunisia is not an exception.
How to tackle youth unemployment
With three shifts in how youth employment is funded, government policy could mend these broken pathways:
1. Fund sourcing as a service in its own right
Reaching young people who are not visible to public employment services at the speed and volume employers need is skilled work. It complements public agencies rather than replacing them, but it also works best when local authorities are part of delivery.
2. Fund the first weeks in work
A named contact, a presence on day one, someone to mediate when things go wrong. This support is time-bound but demanding. Providing this support requires skills in working with employers and resolving workplace problems, alongside the ability to deliver training.
3. Fund efforts to mend broken pathways to work
We only saw these gaps because our recruiting partners were paid when young people stayed in work. That encouraged them to put effort into mending these broken pathways – alongside training rather than instead of it.
Providing skills – and so much more
There are limits to this example. One year is too early to prove the model works. Its lessons also apply best to large recruiters, while firms hiring one or two people at a time are harder to serve this way.
And even a good bridge fails if the wider system discourages crossing it. In Tunisia, some young people may turn down a permanent contract because a subsidized contract can pay more in net terms, or because work would cost them benefits linked to inactivity, such as free healthcare.
Skills mattered for the 500 people hired in Jendouba, and their employer was ready to provide them. What made the hiring process successful was someone going out and finding those people and then supporting them as they started work. The skills-jobs nexus that governments and donors champion requires someone to source potential hires before employment and to support them during the critical first weeks of a new job.
Results-based financing can help make those gaps visible because employment services providers are paid for young people getting and staying in work, not for hours of training delivered. It also gives providers the flexibility to respond when the pathway breaks down.
Skills matter, but skills alone do not build a pathway to long-term employment.
