Recruiting and Engaging Opportunity Youth
A key premise of youth apprenticeship is that it exposes young people to the connections between learning, skill building, and careers early in their lives, and that the insights they gain from that exposure help form (or renew) a basis for educational engagement. And, of course, youth apprenticeship offers another very important benefit: pay. Apprentices earn money while they learn new skills. That fact alone makes youth apprenticeship programs highly attractive to young people, including opportunity youth.
But that doesn’t mean that recruitment into those programs and retention in them take care of themselves: young people generally, and opportunity youth, are often unaware of programs they might qualify for. And because youth apprenticeship is still rare, they are not likely to hear about such opportunities from their most trusted sources of information: their peers, their parents, and their schools. Furthermore, when young people do express interest in training programs, the opportunities might not be available because enrollment is limited or because they need some type of preliminary support or assistance—a skills preparation workshop, perhaps, or help with scheduling, securing the necessary equipment, or arranging transportation. And while apprenticeship has built-in mechanisms (beyond the opportunity to earn money) that help keep participants engaged, some young people—opportunity youth in particular—will need additional support to reengage with school or work. Recognizing that there are a variety of factors that can make it difficult for young people to succeed in apprenticeships, organizations seeking to preserve their relationships with employers may be overly cautious about enrolling opportunity youth in their programs.
AEMF programs have developed a range of strategies, including the two that follow, to connect with and engage even hard-to-reach opportunity youth. Their tactics include using social media and other communications channels to reach out to young people. An ancillary yet essential component of this work is managing partner and stakeholder expectations so that they understand what working with opportunity youth will entail. Click below to read more about these strategies and see how they look in action.
Strategies
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1. Help Opportunity Youth Navigate Employment
Summary
For young people who have been disconnected from education, the challenge of finding the right entry point into the world of work can quickly become overwhelming. These young career seekers need access to navigational aids at school or at home to learn about opportunities. In many cases, the first step for programs connecting young people to apprenticeship is just getting them in the door. Programs can use a combination of face-to-face and virtual approaches to reach out to opportunity youth and establish initial relationships by providing information, advice, and guidance about education and career choices.
Strategy in Action
Capital Workforce Partners (Connecticut)
Capital Workforce Partners (CWP) is a private nonprofit corporation, CWP is the Workforce Development Board of the north central region of Connecticut and a member of the Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Forum. Its mission is to use public and private resources to build a skilled workforce for a competitive regional economy.
CWP joined the AEMF initiative recognizing that opportunity youth were having a hard time accessing services and identifying training and workforce development programs that were right for them. As part of the Hartford Opportunity Youth Collaborative (HOYC)—a strategic coalition of more than 30 community partners—CWP is using a new resource that it calls the Training and Employment Navigational Tool to expand access and increase engagement for young people who need services but are not connected to career education or workforce programs. The online tool is accessible through the region’s 211 site and is layered on top of the larger 211 resource inventory.
The tool first asks users to complete a brief survey about their educational needs, career interests, and desired services. It then directs them to a customized list of employment and training programs that are all provided by HOYC partners and updated regularly. Each listed program or service includes a contact person at the partner organization who is responsible for rapidly reaching out to young people in response to referrals from the tool. Once they make a connection to the service provider, young people are either enrolled in the provider’s program or referred to other service providers via a “warm” handoff from the initial contact person.
The site launched at the beginning of 2021, and its sponsors are planning to promote it with a paid social media marketing push and a peer-to-peer marketing campaign managed by a newly hired marketing coordinator.
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2. Engage High School Students to Keep Them Connected in School
Summary
Opportunity youth are not a static population: A student could be considered to have dropped out one year, but then be re-enrolled the following year. Similarly, a young person could be employed in one month, unemployed the following month, and then employed again a short time later. However, the likelihood that young people will remain disconnected increases dramatically once they first leave school or work without a predetermined next step.
The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing challenges of keeping young people engaged in high school. It has also introduced new ones—particularly for youth who are already struggling academically, those with limited access to internet service or computers or other devices, and those with health care or other family-related issues. School districts across the country have reported increases in students skipping virtual classes or dropping out altogether. In response, schools and community partners have adjusted their typical outreach efforts—implementing targeted student engagement and dropout prevention strategies—so they can find young people in need of support before they disconnect.
Strategy in Action
Capital Workforce Partners (Connecticut)
Capital Workforce Partners (CWP). A private nonprofit corporation, CWP is the Workforce Development Board of the north central region of Connecticut and a member of the Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Forum. Its mission is to use public and private resources to build a skilled workforce for a competitive regional economy.
As part of a coordinated system approach, CWP partners with the Hartford public school system to support both opportunity youth and students who are at risk of dropping out. A dominant concern of Hartford Public Schools (HPS) officials has been that during the COVID pandemic, the relationships between high school students and the caring adults in their schools have grown more tenuous or even been completely interrupted. An HPS program called the Class of 2021 Initiative aims to help those students. It focuses on the approximately 350 seniors who by spring of their senior year have no defined postsecondary educational plans. Those students are deemed to need support to graduate on time and to transition to college or an apprenticeship program. The initiative was geared to assist up to 100 of those seniors, with 60% of them expected to be placed in a postsecondary program by the time they graduated.
In another effort to address concerns about disengagement during the pandemic, HPS, CWP, and the All In! Coalition modified the design of the system’s high school internship program to connect graduating seniors with work-based learning opportunities aligned to their career interests. The new design of the Hartford Student Internship Program includes a flexible content completion model that can trigger payments of stipends to students who attend live workshops, participate in group webinars, or take part in one-on-one tutoring sessions. In other steps to increase participation, HPS raised the sign-on bonus to $50, added a bonus for peer-to-peer referrals, scheduled weekly conferences for all support staff to discuss cases, and instituted a program in which representatives of community-based organizations (outfitted in personal protective equipment) visit students’ homes to conduct crisis support meetings.
Guiding Questions
How does your program identify and recruit opportunity youth?
- Directly, through partner networks, or both? How could these approaches be improved to ensure that no young people fall through the cracks?
- What is your social media strategy? Who owns it? When was the last time it was updated? Is it mobile-first? Multilingual?
Does your organization collaborate with other groups that provide services to young people when trying to identify their needs and revise recruiting strategies to reflect changes in those needs?
- What organizations (faith-based groups, food banks, etc.) stepped up during the pandemic in ways that might make them good outreach partners for your program?
- Are there any new community events or activities (such as organized recreation or sports meetups in public parks) that emerged during the pandemic that might provide venues for connecting with opportunity youth in a community setting?
- What kind of information-gathering efforts (such as surveys or regional youth summits) have emerged that could provide data that strengthens your outreach and programming efforts?
- Do you engage current participants in your opportunity youth programs in efforts to design or implement engagement efforts? If so, how?
- What alternative schools and high school equivalency programs in your region have shown success in recruiting and education young adults without a high school credential and might serve as a springboard for an apprenticeship pathway?