Leveraging Positive Youth Development to Build and Sustain a Young Adult Workforce

Young adulthood (ages 18 to 29) is a critical time for building the skills, confidence, and experiences needed to thrive later in life—including in the workforce. Professionals who work with young adults should know how to draw on young people’s existing strengths to support their professional growth and long-term success. Positive youth development is a strengths-focused framework increasingly being adopted by direct service programs that work with youth—particularly afterschool, education, health, and youth development programs. This blog explores how positive youth development principles apply in workforce development settings for young adults, based on findings from the Generation Work™ initiative.

Generation Work, recently concluded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation after 10 years, aimed to connect more of America’s young adults—especially young people of color from families with low incomes—to meaningful employment by changing how public and private systems prepare and support them for success in the workforce. Generation Work combined best practices from the adult education and training fields (particularly demand-driven workforce development strategies) with positive youth development practices, such as mentoring and opportunities to learn and practice skills in real-world settings. The initiative was carried out by local partnerships—coalitions of workforce development programs, workforce development boards, intermediaries, and (in some sites) employers, funders, and local public agencies—across eight U.S. cities. Child Trends provided technical assistance to local partnership grantees on incorporating positive youth development into their strategies.

Positive youth development was first formalized in the 1990s,[1] building on strengths-based, resilience, and ecological approaches already common in many adolescent-serving programs, particularly afterschool and community-based settings. At the time, much youth programming and policy focused on preventing teenagers’ “problem behaviors,” rather than developing their strengths and potential with supports and encouragement. Positive youth development helped bring greater attention to an alternative approach that emphasized building young people’s skills, relationships, and sense of purpose while shifting attention toward promoting positive outcomes—not just reducing risk. Over subsequent decades, positive youth development became a more cohesive framework for working with adolescents and has been increasingly adopted by direct service programs serving youth.

Generation Work was innovative in asking how positive youth development principles could be extended from adolescence into young adulthood, and how well these principles would translate to organizations that prepare young people for work. In Phase 1, Child Trends developed the PILOT Assessment to guide workforce development programs’ implementation of positive youth development. We found that some local Generation Work partnership organizations were intuitively implementing certain positive youth development practices in their work to prepare young adults for jobs and careers. In other partnerships, organizations collaboratively implemented or expanded their use of positive, developmentally appropriate approaches through learning communities, and used the PILOT tool to guide self-assessment and reflection.

In Phase 2, Generation Work’s focus turned toward employers and its driving questions shifted: Can positive youth development happen in the workplace? If so, what practices and policies would employers put in place? Would company leaders, supervisors, and HR staff—who most likely have no exposure to youth development principles—be receptive to shifting company policies and practices to implement positive youth development?

The eight Phase 2 local partnerships spent four years developing and assessing ways to engage and influence employers to build positive youth development approaches into workplace practices. These practices, in turn, may help employers attract and retain a diverse pipeline of young adult workers Their methods were both explicit (for example, teaching employers about positive youth development as a concept and how it might be applied to young workers) and more behind the scenes (e.g., gathering input from young adult workers about how employers could foster a sense of belonging in the workplace and sharing those strategies with employer partners). As in Phase 1, many Phase 2 partnerships talked to employers about what makes a positive working environment for young adults, informed by their professional experience and direct conversations with young adults. Many partnerships held focus groups, interviews, and informal listening sessions with young adult workers about what they look for and prioritize when looking for jobs and deciding whether to stay.

The table at the end of the blog draws on partners’ experiences to lay out concrete ways that positive youth development principles can translate into workplace practices—drawn from young adults’ feedback or local partnerships themselves, and informed by research on job quality practices. The principles noted in the first column are the positive youth development principles that Child Trends has identified as particularly relevant in workforce settings.

Generation Work partnerships found that employers were receptive to implementing practices aligned with positive youth development, including skills-based hiring approaches for entry-level roles that emphasize young adult workers’ core skills and potential while recognizing that young adults can develop additional technical, social, and professional skills on the job. Other employers implemented formal mentorship programs or internal job-shadowing opportunities to allow young adults to learn through experience, build relationships with more seasoned staff, and better understand pathways for growth. As employers look for ways to attract and retain young adult talent, they can draw on positive youth development as a strategy that allows young workers to identify their goals, build on their strengths, develop positive relationships with peers and adults, and contribute to work that feels meaningful.

Positive Youth Development Practices in the Workplace