Pathways to Careers
Reflecting on Pathways to Careers
Last year, CTOP launched Pathways to Careers (P2C) — a new strategic framework designed to help young people who are severely disconnected from education and employment reconnect not just to jobs, but to meaningful career paths that promise upward mobility for themselves and their families.
In its inaugural year, the P2C framework supported the development of two partnerships: one between COMPASS Youth Collaborative and Forge City Works, and the second between Roca Hartford and Forge City Works. These partnerships were designed to create a seamless continuum of programming across two organizations, where COMPASS and Roca deliver their specialized services such as relentless outreach, crisis response, initial cognitive behavioral skill development, and foundational building of employment skills to cultivate a young person’s readiness to transition successfully into Forge City Works’ robust job training program, where young people continue to build the hard and soft skills needed to succeed in sustainable careers.
In the first year of piloting these partnerships, the organizations aligned on shared indicators of a young person’s readiness for referral to the pathway and planned how to integrate program activities and work together as partners to support youth along their full journeys. With CTOP’s coaching, the organizations met regularly to reflect on youths’ progression and plan for additional supports, as well as to step back, assess, and improve the design of their partnership. As a result, young people are now successfully moving through the pathway, graduating from Forge City Works with hands-on culinary skills, ready for their careers.
A New Partnership: COMPASS Youth Collaborative and Our Piece of the Pie
This year, CTOP applied lessons learned from its first pilots to support the design of a new P2C partnership between COMPASS and Our Piece of the Pie (OPP). Unlike previous P2C partnerships, OPP offers a wide range of paid career pathways as a large multiservice organization, including in-house social enterprises, service-learning projects, and certification programs and credentials in industries such as IT, healthcare, construction, transportation, security, and manufacturing.
Differentiating this design series was that in contrast to the limited experience that previous P2C partners had working together, COMPASS and OPP had a history of informal partnership and shared youth. Given that context and the complexity of designing for multiple career pathways within OPP, the CTOP team implemented the following enhancements to design and piloting to improve clarity and alignment:
- Engaged a broader group of staff from both organizations in the co-design process to ensure responsiveness to on-the-ground realities and facilitate buy-in.
- Extended the design phase to support more relationship building and trust development as well as account for the range of career pathways at OPP.
- Created formal training for frontline staff not involved in design sessions so that all program team members, from outreach workers to team leads and directors, had a shared understanding of the pathway’s purpose, process, and expectations.
This P2C partnership is already streamlining operations and improving communication and collaboration between COMPASS and OPP, including enabling more consistent and responsive supports for the more then 25 young people already dually enrolled as they move through the pathway, creating more opportunities for young people to access careers that lead to long-term success and self-sufficiency.