The impact of youth leadership program on perceived employability skills: Evidence from Brunei Darussalam (early view)

Abstract

Youth leadership programs foster skills development in youth which are pivotal for gaining successful careers and being more employable throughout their career. Given the concerning youth unemployment issues in Brunei, the study aims to highlight the importance of youth leadership programs and examine their influence on perceived employability skills. By utilising structural equation modeling to analyse the survey data gathered from 229 samples of participants from youth leadership programs, it was revealed that the impact of learning involving skills-based and attitudinal outcomes has significant positive relationships with perceived employability skills. The results further confirmed the role of behavioral outcomes as a mediating variable in the relationship between learning and perceived employability skills. Findings from this study can be valuable for program designers, practitioners, and stakeholders in contributing to the process of structuring and making ongoing improvements to these programs to align with the essential employability skills. It also offers youth the foundation to be employable in the 21st-century job market, by highlighting the importance of youth leadership programs as a channel through which youth acquire desirable capabilities necessary for attaining a set of attributes that reflect the employability skills sought by employees in the current competitive job market. Therefore, the study can be a starting point in moving forward to mitigate the unemployment issues in Brunei through improving programs to meet the demand of employers concerning employability skills. The study provides notable contributions to the existing body of literature on youth leadership development in Brunei as well as contributing to a few other studies in the Asian region to demonstrate the impact of youth leadership programs on employability skills perceptions.