BUILDING JOB SKILLS BUILDS SOCIAL CAPITAL
Continuing our journey through the five components of the Career Skills and Connections framework, today we focus on Work Assignments.
Meaningful Work Assignments Build Job Skills and Social Capital
In our last newsletter, we discussed the importance of assessing students’ skills. The next step is giving young workers achievable, meaningful assignments that use those skills. Done well, work assignments keep students engaged while also helping organizations meet real needs.
We often hear that one of the biggest challenges in employing high school students is finding work that is meaningful to them and useful to the organization.
One effective approach is to create a mix of short- and long-term projects for young workers. Short-term projects offer them many opportunities for success, help them use or learn a variety of skills, and enable them to accomplish important tasks for the organization. Long-term projects allow young workers to fill gaps when they are less busy and to build important project management and time management skills.
High school students have shown real value in areas such as social media, IT support, data entry, compliance, and event planning.
Examples of strong work assignments include:
- helping develop social media content
- assisting IT staff with software and hardware setup
- supporting sales and accounting teams with record-keeping and data entry
- helping legal and compliance teams organize policies and monitor regulatory changes, and coordinating volunteers and communications for events
An often-overlooked aspect of these types of projects is that they typically involve multiple teams or departments within an organization. Getting students to work across teams and meet as many professionals as possible can help build their communication skills and their professional networks.
When young people are trusted with meaningful assignments, they do more than build skills- they build confidence, credibility, and the workplace relationships that become the foundation of social capital.
What’s On Our Mind – Helping Youth Make Connections
Photo courtesy of Larry E. Thomas
We were thrilled to participate in Durham YouthWorks’ Summer Kickoff and the Opportunity Fair for Durham Public Schools students held at the Emily K Center this month.
Durham YouthWorks is a program designed to help young adults develop critical skills and explore career options with local employers. The summer kickoff event included career readiness sessions and a financial literacy simulation led by Coastal Federal Credit Union. We participated in mock interviews and the financial simulation, preparing students to make workplace connections and sound financial decisions.
The Opportunity Fair is a college and career fair for students exploring pathways through college, trade school, military, and employment. It was great to meet so many eager, engaged students and share our advice on building and maintaining professional connections. With many students, we discussed the importance of relationships and gave them access to a Relationship Mapping activity, which is also available on our website.
LET’S STAY CONNECTED
We would appreciate your thoughts on our initiative and welcome opportunities to collaborate. You can reach us at info@youthworkconnect.org and we look forward to staying connected.
