Skills development to support graduates in entering thelabor market in Tanzania : A Minor Field Study

Sammanfattning: Increasing the access to post-secondary education is a top priority around the world, but still many graduates experience serious challenges in entering the labor market. In Tanzania the issue is prominent and partly associated with the skills mismatch, but also with the imbalance of the number of jobs available in relation to the number of graduates seeking for a job. Skills development is acritical element of all efforts in this challenging area, and therefore a number of organizations has emerged to focus on this, especially in Tanzania. The area has been explored in the literature, but mainly quantitatively on a macro-level. Hence, there is a need of more qualitative research regarding the best practices of organizations focusing on skills development. This thesis therefore aims to investigate how skills development organizations can support graduates in entering the labor market in Tanzania. The thesis is a Minor Field Study, implying that semi-structured interviews with graduates and skillsdevelopment organizations were conducted on-site in Tanzania. Further, hypotheses, regarding challenges that graduates experience when entering the labor market, were formulated and tested through qualitative and quantitative data. The findings imply that the challenges graduates experience can be categorized into three groups: structural, skills and attitude. Skills development organizations can therefore support graduates in entering the labor market by addressing these challenges and adopt measures in three different operations: the planning, the execution and the evaluation of skills development activities. Except for specific actions within each operation, the findings accentuate the importance of incorporating both the graduate and employer perspective, as well as viewing the support as a long-term process, from the first years of studies to obtaining employment.