This paper reviews a number of previous studies that have investigated how measure of non-cognitive skills predict important life outcomes such as educational attainment, employment, earnings, and self-reported health and life satisfaction. All reviewed studies analyse data from large-scale surveys from multiple countries and rely on the Big-Five framework to assess non-cognitive skills.

The paper finds that measures of non-cognitive skills are robustly and consistently associated to indicators of life success in youth and adulthood, and have incremental predictive power over traditional measures of cognitive ability.