Securing sustained employment for unemployed youth depends on the youth's work commitment, which would require training for the youth's soft skills. However, training for the youth has not been impressively effective and the effectiveness would hinge on the youth's need for training. Such a need is likely to stem from the youth's experience of powerlessness. To examine the possibility, a survey collected data from 249 unemployed youths in Tianjin, China. Results show that the youth's powerlessness was a significant condition raising the contribution of soft skill training to work commitment. This conditioning effect was valuable because neither soft skill training nor powerlessness manifested a significant main effect on work commitment. The results imply the suitability of providing soft skill training to alienated unemployed youth to elevate their work commitment.
Youth unemployment is a problem drawing public concern in China (Bai, 2006 and Wu, 2003) as well as industrialized countries in the West (Julkunen, 2002 and Worth, 2003). At societal level, the local economy and competition in the international labor market certainly are determinants of youth employment (Bynner, 1996 and Mills and Blossfeld, 2005). Apart from the demand-side factors, the supply-side factors of the youth (i.e., aged below 30) have a role to play. A supply-side factor that puts youth into a disadvantaged position is the youth's deficit in work commitment (Bynner and Parsons, 2000 and Carmeli, 2003). Work commitment is therefore of concern because of its relationships with work adjustment and productivity (Firestone et al., 2005 and Hyggen, 2007). Hence, a way to secure the employment of youth tends to be the boosting of work commitment in unemployed youth (Hyggen, 2007). The means to boost work commitment inevitably rests on training to raise unemployed youth's interpersonal skill, work attitudes or ethic, and eventually an identity for work (Hammer, 2007). These qualities are soft skills that require designated training, apart from training on vocational or hard skills (Maxwell, 2007 and Smyth, 2008). Soft skills are particularly essential for emotional labor, which means regulating one's emotion for the work purpose, as required for an increasingly competitive, restructured labor market (Taylor & Tyler, 2000). Training on soft and hard skills embodies the human capital development approach to upgrade unemployed youth's employability, which refers to adaptation to the changing work environments (Lindsay, McQuiad, & Dutton, 2007). However, the approach has not proven to be notably effective, based on many studies in the West (Karoly, 2001). A probable concern is that the effectiveness depends on the context and thereby the youth's life experiences. Particularly, the experience of disempowerment or alienation is likely to happen in the youth's life, such as that in a low-skill, low-paid job (Schissel, 2001). The experience is likely a condition for the rationale and success for training to uplift the unemployed youth's soft skills in tackling disempowerment (Parsons, Gutierrez, & Cox, 1998). This conditioning effect is the focus of the present study in a Chinese context.
