Generation Work™, launched by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2016, was designed to connect more of America’s young adults—including young people of color from families with low incomes—with meaningful employment by changing the way that public and private systems prepare them for success in the workplace.
In the first phase of the initiative, local partnerships in five cities across the country worked to align various education, employment, and support services to help young people develop the skills required to succeed in the working world, link them with employers, and increase their advancement and earning opportunities.
In the second phase, local partnerships in eight cities piloted employer engagement strategies to influence employer practices that support the recruitment, hiring, and retention of young adults.
By combining employer-facing strategies aligned to labor market needs with positive youth development approaches—for example, fostering positive relationships, giving young people opportunities to contribute and belong, and facilitating youth agency—Generation Work sought to promote equitable employment opportunities for all young people.
Generation Work’s positive youth development approach
Child Trends served as a national partner from Generation Work’s inception, helping local partnerships integrate positive youth development approaches into their programming and their employer engagement efforts. Positive youth development, sometimes referred to by the acronym PYD, is an approach that focuses on young people’s strengths and promotes positive outcomes for young people by providing opportunities for growth and learning, fostering positive relationships, and furnishing the support needed to build on their leadership strengths. In the workplace, young adults need structured and supportive opportunities to develop and expand their skills within a trustworthy and safe environment that encourages their input and ideas, opinions, and perspectives.
Workforce development program staff can better meet individuals’ needs by developing positive relationships with young people; ensuring physically and emotionally safe environments; strengthening linkages between organizations, families, and communities; and improving youth’s developmentally appropriate skills (that is, both their soft skills and their academic and technical competencies). Employers can also implement practices and policies in the workplace to engage with young people in ways that align with evidence-based positive youth development principles. For example, employers can provide young adults with supportive supervision that meets their needs and builds positive relationships, and by offering them opportunities to build skills and advance in their careers and to contribute and provide meaningful input to workplace decisions.
For the workforce development programs that participated in Generation Work, a positive youth development approach required nimble and creative thinking from staff and an organizational culture that supports both staff and young people. One challenge was to identify concrete ways to implement positive youth development approaches consistently. Employers also face unique constraints to implementing positive practices in the workplace, including competing priorities. The individualized approach of positive youth development requires more complexity than simply sending staff to a training, but is more likely to engage young adults and achieve positive outcomes.
Child Trends developed research briefs, blogs, and tools for the Generation Work initiative. These products were designed to help workforce development organizations better understand positive youth development approaches in both program and workplace settings, integrate these principles into a program setting and employer engagement, and learn from the strategies implemented by other programs. Links to these products are below.
Resources developed as part of Generation Work:
- Leveraging Positive Youth Development to Build and Sustain a Young Adult Workforce
- Lessons From Generation Work on Centering Young Adult Worker Voice in Employer Engagement
- Tipsheets for Workforce Development Program Staff to Prepare Employers and Young Workers for Conversations
- Promising Practices for Integrating Positive Youth Development in the Workplace
- Using Photos to Capture Young Adults’ Experiences with Positive Youth Development
- The PILOT Tool
- Programs for Youth and Young Adults: Science-informed Definitions
- Embedding a racial equity perspective in PYD programs
- Youth Engagement Scan Blog
- Good Jobs Report
Case Studies