Developing a new Learning-to-Earning Guide: How to design employment solutions that meet youth needs

• In Event: Highlighted Session: How youth-led research surfaces gaps and influences policy in local youth workforce development systems

Proposal

What challenges do young people experience when they transition from school to work and how can the development community better support their needs?

To answer this question, we engaged teams of youth researchers in Kenya, Iraq, and Guatemala. To better understand what youth really experience and what kind of support they say they need, our youth-led team conducted in-depth interviews with 78 youth and surveyed more than 1000 youth across all three countries. We learned that the transition from school to work most youth experience is a winding path, not the seamless transition that many are led to expect. Youth experiences related to accurate expectations of the world of work, mental health needs, practical work experience, as well as support for non-traditional forms of work such as informal labor, self-employment and entrepreneurship guided us to identify targeted programmatic and funding recommendations that can help the development community be more response to youth needs. These findings include the following: false narratives about youth transitions from school to work may be causing harm; as they impact youth mental health and make it harder for them to find work; that support models often overlook the role that informal work plays; and that intersectional frameworks reveal that youth-lived experiences vary greatly. To make this knowledge as useful and practical as possible, we have compiled it into a guide that can help decision makers and program designers produce better solutions for youth.

In this paper, we will share the key takeaways from our research, including samples of the ‘personas’, or data-informed stories of diverse youth through young people’s voices. These personas include recommendations for program designers and policy-makers. A persona is a composite based on our research that represents the needs, thoughts, struggles, goals, and lived experiences of potential youth employment program participants. The personas in this guide are not meant to be an exhaustive representation of young people’s work statuses or intersectional identities. Personas are created to help designers empathize with people to deeply understand their realities, passions, motivations, desires, barriers, and challenges to design solutions that can effectively meet their needs. As a tool, a persona helps designers see and experience the world from the perspective of young people and prevents them from generalizing all youth into one bucket. For each persona we created career journeys that depict the winding career path that the persona experiences. The career journey for each persona is based on our qualitative data. That is to say, these are real examples of young people’s career journeys that youth interviewees shared with us.

Author

• Tsega Tadesse Belachew, University of Maryland