New Approaches: Using Video to Connect Youth to Work
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    • Hack the Hood
    • Winnow Design Studio
    • CWIB Workforce Accelerator Fund
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    • Reflecting on the Process
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  • Insights
    • Hack the Hood's Special Sauce
    • Challenges that Disconnected Youth Face
    • Personas
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  • Ideas
    • Develop a Mentor Matrix
    • Spark a Paradigm Shift
    • Demonstrate Soft Skills
    • Capture Individual Stories
    • Recruit Disconnected Youth
  • Videos
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Demonstrate the Soft Skills

Demonstrate soft skills in action, such as talking with clients.  Show and discuss the elements of workplace behavior.
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Benefits of Soft Skills Videos

  • Bridging the knowledge gap for low income youth is essential to helping them succeed at work.
  • Give youth a preview into professional settings. Use videos to prompt conversations.
  • Instead of describing an aspect like “professional attire,” video allows instructors to show it and discuss.
  • Capturing youth on video, demonstrating professional skills they have learned will be affirming for the youth and the organization.
  • Help youth catch up on lessons when they have to miss a day due to difficulties at home.

Demonstrate: Professional Empowerment

A video library of professional scenarios give youth a way to understand soft skills which are hard to describe without example. 

Encourage youth to communicate their newly developed expertise to others by making video tutorials. This will also help to make the videos more relevant to fellow youth.

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Structuring the Videos

1. Demonstration of calling a client and working with feedback, etc.
2. Preparing to visit a Tech company
3. Demonstration of code switching vs finding your own voice at work.
4. Building a resume
5. Building a LinkedIn profile
6. Links to quizzes to find your strengths
7. Small business case study videos. Videos of clients discussing the impact of the website on their business. 
8. Breakdowns of how professionals perceive youth habits.
9. Exposure to different Tech company environments.
10. Paths to work: applying to college, navigating job boards, networking with people you know.

Points to Consider

  • Videos would be a prompt for discussion, not simply a model to mimic. Help students interpret professionalism in Tech for themselves. 
  • The “each one teach one” model in the classroom helped youth feel more connected to each other and was confidence-building for participants. Turning to video instead may change the connectedness the cohort felt.

How it might look

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