- Chile turned a growing digital skills gap into an opportunity. With IDB support, it launched the region’s largest reskilling initiative to diversify exports beyond copper and tap into the fast-growing global services economy.
- A demand-driven model linking training to employer needs helped train over 30,000 people, with strong results: most graduates found jobs quickly, boosted their incomes, and gained access to higher-productivity digital careers.
Following a decade of strong growth, Chile’s economic expansion slowed markedly after 2015, while its export structure remained highly concentrated in copper. Limited diversification and persistent productivity gaps constrained the country’s growth potential. At the same time, global trade in digitally enabled services expanded faster than trade in goods, creating opportunities for countries with skilled labor to diversify exports, attract investment, and generate higher productivity jobs.
For Chile, capturing this opportunity required closing a widening digital skills gap and improving coordination between public institutions, training providers, and the private sector to ensure that skills development aligned with labor market demands.
Through the Program to Support Chile’s Global Services Export Sector, the IDB Group supported the government’s strategy to position Chile as a regional hub for global services. The IDB Group comprises the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), IDB Invest and IDB Lab.
The program helped translate this objective into an operational framework that linked skills development, employment intermediation, and investment attraction. Rather than focusing solely on expanding traditional training supply, the operation supported a demand driven public-private collaboration model in which employers played a central role in defining occupational profiles, training standards, and hiring needs.
This approach contributed to the consolidation of Talento Digital, a national platform for accelerated digital skills training. The program brought together public agencies, industry associations, training foundations, and international bootcamp providers to align training content with private sector demand, certify quality, and connect graduates directly to firms through structured intermediation mechanisms such as the Semillero de Talento.
By strengthening coordination across actors, the operation aimed to ensure that skills development translated into measurable labor market outcomes and supported Chile’s broader export diversification agenda.
Better Jobs, Higher Earnings
Between 2019 and 2024, Talento Digital became Chile’s main instrument for upskilling and reskilling in digital occupations. Over this period, the program managed more than 30,000 scholarships, making it the largest digital reskilling initiative in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Program monitoring data show that 79% of graduates who became employed found a job within six months of completing training, with a 47% increase in average reported income six months after graduation, compared to income reported at program entry. In addition, 77% of participants successfully graduated and were either employed or pursuing further education, indicating positive transitions into the labor market or continued skills accumulation.
Beyond short-term employment outcomes, the program delivered structural gains in inclusion and ecosystem strengthening. Women accounted for 36% of graduates, and 25% of participants entered the program without completed tertiary education, demonstrating that intensive, short cycle training can expand access to higher productivity digital occupations among groups facing larger barriers.
On the supply side, partnerships with more than 28 international bootcamp providers raised training standards and facilitated the adoption of modern instructional methodologies. On the demand side, the Semillero de Talento connected graduates with over 400 private sector firms, strengthening links between training providers and employers.
Importantly, the program’s outcomes are supported by rigorous causal evidence. An independent impact evaluation estimates that being pre-selected for Talento Digital increased the probability of obtaining a formal employment contract by 8% six months after course start and raised formal earnings by 113% over the same period (Neilson et al. 2024).
The evaluation also finds stronger transitions into tech related jobs, particularly among women, suggesting that the program contributed to reducing gender gaps in access to digital employment.
At the sector level, the talent pipeline supported through this program contributed to Chile’s global services strategy by strengthening the availability of skilled labor, a key factor in investment decisions. During the period, Chile attracted and established more than 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) projects in global services, reinforcing the link between skills development, services exports, and investment attraction.
Challenges and Lessons
The program faced sustainability and scaling challenges related to fiscal consolidation and changes in government priorities, which limited the expansion of public funding and prompted the exploration of co-financing arrangements with the private sector and regional governments. In addition, rapid technological change—most notably the acceleration of artificial intelligence—requires continuous updates to occupational profiles and training curricula.
These experiences highlight key lessons: the importance of sustained private sector engagement to maintain relevance; diversified funding sources to protect scale under fiscal constraints; and strong monitoring and evaluation systems to ensure quality as programs expand.
Building Skills Strengthens Competitiveness
Chile’s experience demonstrates that digital skills development can function as a competitiveness and export diversification strategy when aligned with employer demand and embedded in a coordinated institutional framework.
By combining scale, inclusion, and rigorous evidence on labor market impacts, this program shows how skills investments can generate measurable development results while strengthening the foundations for services-led growth.