4,000,000 young people aged 16-24 are not enrolled in, or failed to complete high school. That’s a lot of kids. And while many suffer from learning disorders or are facing impossibly challenging circumstances, there are plenty that drop out simply because the traditional education system failed to capture their attention.
The Kellogg Foundation created the New Option Initiative, a long term project committed to developing an alternative career path for those high-school drop-outs, intercepting talented at risk youth before they hit rock bottom.
They assembled an elite team of consultants, including professors Vijay Kumar and Chris Conley from the Institute of Design. They in turn hired several students, including myself. We spent the summer of 2008 meeting with young adults, business owners and other stakeholders, and developed a first prototype.
PRIMARY RESEARCH – BUSINESS OWNERS
We first conducted interviews with owners and managers in businesses that typically hire at entry level. The goal of these interviews was mainly to identify hiring and training practices.
Insights:
All business owners were looking for the same qualities in an ideal hire:
- responsible
- resourceful
- enthusiastic
Overwhelmingly, employers saw a high-school diploma as a sign that a youth might posses these qualities. The stereotype of the dead-beat, no energy high-school drop-out was brought-up over and over and over.
PRIMARY RESEARCH – YOUTH
However, here is the reality of what we found:
Insights:
The key insights revolve around these themes:
- self-discovery: they don’t want to be told what they should do.
- strength + interests: they have to find something they are genuinely interested in. They can’t fake it.
- tangibility: they don’t do well in the abstract.
EXPOSURE ACADEMY
We developed an event designed to allow youth to explore those 3 insights. Over 2 days, we took 6 youths to visit 4 businesses.
We visited an ad agency, a photographer’s studio, a real estate agent and a major theatre company. We asked each businesses to:
- introduce employees with unusual career paths
- engage the youth in hands-on activities
Insights - youths
- casual tone allowed youth to relate to businesses
- personal stories revealed how people go from a to b
- jobs seemed more attainable
- experience helped hem identify their own skills
Insights - businesses
- de-mystified the “drop-out” stereotype
- employees discovered things they didn’t know about each other
NEXT STEPS
Both youth and businesses responded positively to the experiment to such an extent that The Kellogg Foundation agreed to repeat the experience several times over the next six months. The following will be address in the next iteration:
- can we get even more genuine interactions by involving the youths in the organization of the visits?
- how can we make it more meaningful for the business
