In order to address a gap in soft skills and support new recruits to successfully integrate into the company, Richbond, a Moroccan furniture manufacturer, partnered with the Vocational Career Center in Casablanca to train youth in soft skills essential to the work environment. Through this collaboration, Richbond management aimed to recruit some of the best junior profiles from this group, who participated in trainings that strengthened core non-technical skills such as teamwork, basic rules in the workplace, values and goals, and oral communication.

"Recruiters face a shortage of competent profiles in terms of soft skills," explained Majida Najeddine, a Skills and Job Management Manager at Richbond. "Many youth lack career guidance and do not know how to behave and advance in the business environment. And that is where the Career Center initiative comes in. It offers a set of tools to address this gap and enable young people to meet the demands of the job market."

More than 550 potential recruits benefited from a five-day soft skills training program delivered by Career Center Counselors using modules from USAID Career Center’s work readiness catalogue Najahi-Prêt pour l’Emploi (“My Success – Ready for Employment”) between May 2018 and January 2019. By the end of the training sessions, Richbond recruited 522 youth, which represents more than 90 percent of the participants.

Following these trainings, Najeddine and the Richbond team expressed their satisfaction with the level of preparation of these young recruits through their involvement with the Career Center, noting a marked improvement in the level of professionalism of the new recruits compared to other young people they have recruited prior to their partnership with the Career Center.

By working with governmental and private-sector partners on specialized workforce development opportunities, the USAID Career Center activity supports Morocco's efforts to improve youth employability through job skills development. To date, the activity has reached over 175,000 youth and developed more than 250 partnerships with private sector organizations. Work readiness trainings have been introduced into a few universities' curricula as well as into all of the Office for Vocational Training and Job Promotion’s (OFPPT) 360+ vocational training institutes throughout the country. USAID continues to work with the Government of Morocco to assist with their expansion of the Career Center model to all 12 regions of the country.