Complexities of Youth Lives and Engagement in Workforce Development: Implications for Social Work

Background: According to the Social Science Research Council (Burds-Sharps & Lewis, 2018), in 2016, 4.6 million (11.7 percent) young people in the U.S. were disconnected (not in school and not working). The negative implications of this for youths’ life trajectory require social work practitioners’ attention at community, program, and policy levels. This study examined how local workforce development organizations understand and address youth circumstances as they relate to success in employment and training activities.

Method: Qualitative phone interviews were conducted with members of local and state workforce development organizations (i.e., workforce boards and contracted agencies). Thirty local WDBs across the U.S. were selected for the sample in order to obtain geographic diversity. A total of 61 interviews were conducted. Domains of the interview protocol included: initiatives for youth specific populations; funding sources; local level data sharing and use; contracting processes; mechanisms of engaging youth voice; opportunities and barriers for engaging youth in services. Recognition theory (Rossiter, 2014) and ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) provided the conceptual frames for the study. Thematic analysis (Lyons & Coyle, 2015) was used to analyze transcript data. A coding scheme was developed by the first author who also conducted the initial coding of all transcripts. The second author coded a subset of transcripts to verify coding. In addition, the authors reviewed state and local strategic plans to triangulate the interview data.

Results: Four core themes were identified: 1) Acknowledgment and appreciation of the complex challenges facing youth. Qualitative descriptions identified family circumstances, intergenerational poverty, mental health challenges, housing insecurity, immigration status, and others, as key challenges. 2) Understanding how complexities impact youth’s ability to engage in workforce development activities (enrollment, completion, and positive outcomes). This included specific barriers (i.e. physically getting to workforce activities, emotional stressors of above mentioned contextual factors), engagement hesitancy, and varying needs (workforce skillset needs vs. immediate needs of youth looking for work). 3) Locality-specific considerations of youth circumstances (e.g. urban vs. rural, partnerships and collaborations, specific needs related to diverse populations). 4) Importance of developing mechanisms to include youth voice. Responses also identified perceived successes and challenges of providing services in the context of COVID.

Implications: These data provide rich description of the realities of youth lives that must be addressed to allow youth to effectively use the workforce services to which they are entitled. Social work is well-suited to address the complexity of youth lives but the social work role in youth workforce development appears modest. The workforce development system provides robust opportunities for social workers to engage in micro, mezzo, and policy practice to address youth disconnection. Trauma-informed, wraparound, culturally congruent services inclusive of youth voice, are needed; social work can bring this expertise to the field of workforce development. In these ways, workforce planning can ultimately be more squarely situated within social work domains, which directly reflects goals of meeting the expressed needs of vulnerable populations and improving the systems with which they interact.