Mobility, Career Pathways, and the Landscape of Employer and Youth Engagement in the South

“This paper examines two important elements needed to prepare Southern youth and young adults to connect with rewarding employment opportunities: employer and youth engagement. It offers a framework to assess the preconditions for effective employer and youth engagement, identifies examples of promising efforts in a range of communities that represent the economic diversity present in the region, and considers what philanthropy can do to reinforce the need for attention to employer and youth engagement and proliferate and deepen practice in the South” (p.3).

(Abstractor: Author)

“A confluence of challenges is driving Southern communities to rethink their strategies about talent development. The South’s traditional competitive advantage as a low-cost, low-skill region is vanishing. Entry-level skills requirements for living-wage employers are rising. Demographic shifts—the aging of the incumbent workforce and the changing racial and ethnic profile of new and potential entrants into the workplace—are undermining old orthodoxies about the composition of the workforce. The social and practical costs of maintaining the South’s historic low-investment practices and policies, particularly toward youth of color, are increasingly undeniable. The communities profiled here are mustering the will and leveraging the opportunity to do things differently in response to these trends. In all of them, a driving motivation is to meet the needs of employers to ensure that they succeed and grow as economic anchors for their regions, and backbone organizations of all stripes are working to engage employers in support of new education-to-career channels. Corresponding levels of intentional youth engagement are much rarer in the South. Where present, as in Durham and Brownsville, they reflect the conviction of leaders that engaging young people to inform the design of education-to-career opportunities and pathways can contribute to stronger youth participation and higher rates of persistence and success. And examples such as Brownsville demonstrate powerfully that deliberate engagement of young people from historically marginalized communities, coupled with visible support from adults in positions of institutional authority, can shift young people’s aspirations, expectations, and success patterns on the education-to-career pathway” (p.30). (Abstractor: Author)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2015
• Author(s): No Individual Author Listed
• Organizational Author(s): MDC
• Funding Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Long Dang
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies