EP06: Mentorship That Matters: Building Youth Career Confidence

ALEXIS FRANKS: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, all you workforce warriors across the country. My name is Alexis Franks, and I am your director of membership for the National Association of workforce development professionals. And in today’s episode, we’ll be diving into a topic that’s at the heart of building a brighter tomorrow, and that’s around mentorship in youth workforce development programs. So think about this. Between the ages of 13 and 25 young people face some of the most critical decisions of their lives. They’re deciding career paths, education choices, working on life skills. There is so much happening during these transformative years, and that’s where we as workforce development professionals, mentors and community leaders, can make a real impact. But mentorship isn’t just about giving advice, it’s about guiding young people to make informed decisions for themselves, helping them navigate their challenges and empowering them to create their own success. And how do we do that effectively, and how do we ensure that we’re not just talking at them, but truly supporting and equipping them for the future. Well, today, I am thrilled to welcome Scott with Hats and Ladders, who has had extensive experience in mentoring and shaping programs that really, truly make a difference. Scott, thank you so much for being with us today.

SCOTT BREWSTER: Thank you, Alexis. I’m happy to be here and to chat more.

ALEXIS FRANKS: Well, now we’ll do what we call passing the mic. So Scott, let’s jump right in. Can you share a little bit about your background and what kind of drew you to working with youth and their career development journey?

SCOTT BREWSTER: Absolutely. I am Dr. Scott Brewster. I am the co-founder of Hats and Ladders, and I work predominantly now with building partnerships. And some of that, I’d like to say is on the ground partnerships, where we go into organizations and work directly with mentors and youth, and so it’s very exciting, a very exciting world. So hopefully some of my insights will resonate with you and your listeners. So I started out in music, which is interesting because I ended up in workforce development. I was a teacher for a number of years teaching music, and then I just got excited during the 90s about what technology was doing to improve education. So I then, at that point, had a mentor myself, who was a music a musician, but also an educator, and he said lots of great things are happening in the world as technology is empowering us to do more great things for young people. So I went back, got my PhD, and then fast forward a few years. I did some college teaching. I did some dissertation advising. I was the Director of Online Learning for UNC Greensboro, probably for almost 10 years. And so I just had a lot of varied experiences across a lot of different youth worlds, and those worlds allowed me to connect with young people and began to kind of influence what their direction might be in the future. So at some point, I connected with the New York City edtech firm. They made games for learning. We built Hats and Ladders together as a cooperative work, and Michelle Obama championed our product, and I’d like to say, from that point on, it turned into a snowball, because everybody’s learning about us, and then we’re able to now be around for about eight and a half years. We’re the largest population center. We’re in New York City and Chelsea, but we serve all of New York City Youth, career readiness, and I, I love being in this role, because I literally am in the city, and I go out, and I do site visits, and I hear young people talk to me about like, the things that have inspired them to move in one direction or another, either through our program or through things that happen in tandem or adjacent with our program. So it’s really, really thrilling to be in a place where there’s just so many different types of youth and so many youth with different needs, and being able to feel and see and make that difference and feel accomplished and feel that like you’ve made a difference.

ALEXIS FRANKS: Absolutely, Scott, that is quite a transition to go from music to workforce development, but I do think, just as you said, it’s all about the effect and the impact that you’ve been able to have on the lives of so many youth from so many different perspectives. So that’s very interesting. Thank you for sharing kind of your background. So if you can share too, why do you think mentorship is so important for you today?

SCOTT BREWSTER: That’s a great question. So you know, as I described in my journey just now, it was a very windy, uncertain road. I did 20 things before I got to where I am now, right? You know, it’s in today’s world, it’s very complex, and young people just have a tough time navigating through what they’ve got to navigate to get to their end game. And so mentorship is especially crucial for the age brackets that we serve, which is age 13, all the way up through about 2425 because this is an immense time of self discovery. Young people are learning things about themselves, and maybe that includes figuring out what career direction they want, who they are, even. And once you kind of discover who you are, and maybe try on or test out the waters in a few careers. You may be ready to navigate this complex world, but having somebody there beside you, somebody that you can champion, that can champion you, and can be available to be a sounding board and just give you advice is really critical. Think of all the young people that are just full of ambition and dreams, but they often lack. Maybe the real world context. Pretend you’re a 17 year old and you think you want to do nursing, and your great aunt was a nurse, but maybe that’s all you know. You see some nurses on TV that we are short on nurses because the pandemic proved that was healthcare was a space and a place where we needed employees. And so those are the only things you know, and so imagine having somebody that you can just call on and be that person beside you to chat about what it’s like to be there in that real context.

ALEXIS FRANKS: That is so true. I just had some conversations with some young people recently and their idea and thoughts of money and what you can do, or being able to afford a home, and what that looks like. It is so skewed, but they need the space to be able to say, Okay, this is what I’m thinking, but maybe this isn’t how things are in the real world, and maybe that changes their view of their education or their view of their career path. So that is definitely true. It’s a time period of self discovery, to say the least.

SCOTT BREWSTER: Yeah, I know one thing that we forget about too, is that mentors can open up doors to help a young person figure out the complexities of networking. Now, I know that sounds random for me to say, but networking is so precious, like young people just don’t realize necessarily what it means and how to do it and and what a mentor, at least mentor that is very well networked, can do is not only offer a young person advice, be that sounding board, etc, etc, etc, but they can introduce them to people that they know who can be additional voices in that career decision making kind of world that young person is going through. So that is a like to me, is a big one. And I offer to connect any youth that I work with. I offer to connect them to resources that I have, and I encourage them to get on LinkedIn early, and I talk about all of the things that you should and could do, because it’s important.

ALEXIS FRANKS: That’s huge. That is huge. Scott, and I didn’t even think about the networking piece of that, because sometimes they may hear the things that we’re saying, but it truly doesn’t resonate until they hear it from someone else. So I think building that next network is can help them be extremely successful, that’s great. So Scott, you talked a little a lot about how you’re providing guidance and offering things such as networking and being that sounding board. But how do you balance between giving them advice or telling them what to do and encouraging them, between how they do that and how they’re making their own decisions.

SCOTT BREWSTER: That is a great question, and I have been actually working on being a better listener. I am. I’ve been around the block, and I was so excited when those AI assistants came on and they could record your meeting and take notes for you, but I found myself not like when I take my own notes. I pay more attention, I’m i I am listening more, and that is a big thing. So if youth understand that you are listening to them. In and that you really are helping them brainstorm and think through and letting them take the lead. I think it’s really powerful. If you’re just going to sit with a young person and do your own thing, be on your phone, check your emails, and do this and go through the motions, it’s not going to really be helpful for that youth. And when you asked me to be on this podcast, I there’s something that a methodology that someone introduced me to over the holiday break, called Clean Language, and it’s a questioning technique that encourages people to express their thoughts and feelings without the influence or interpretation from the listener. So it’s about asking open ended questions that don’t lead young people that don’t like allow you as the mentor to influence their responses, but allows them as an individual to dive deeper, dig into their own experiences and discover their own solutions. Because interestingly, inside all of us are the answers, but sometimes you just need that person, that other kind of mentor, person in your life, to help you weave everything together. And so to me, that’s an important thing, and then making sure young people know that it’s okay to make a mistake. We all make mistakes. What did you learn from that mistake? You can also teach them. That’s even good to use in interviews that you want to talk about how you saw the challenge, and so that’s critical. And then sharing your own experiences, even if you messed up, you want them to know that you know you mess up too. So I think those are the big things. Active listening. Don’t lead the witness. Let them kind of part of the solution. Make sure young people know it’s okay to make a mistake, and then tell them, be real with them. Tell them some of the mistakes you’ve made and how you solve those problems.

ALEXIS FRANKS: Absolutely, I think, exactly to what you said. Being that listener is you find out so much from a youth when you just let them talk and they can really, you’re right, the answer is, right inside of you, they just need the space in place to be able to bring that out and figure it out on their own. And I think that ultimately, we have a lot of measures tied around youth programs and workforce development, but I think the one that makes the largest impact is, can they leave your program making those informed decisions on their own, and the moment they can do that and say, Okay, this is what I want. This. These are my next steps. I know how to move forward. Then we’ve really done something. We’ve really held that impact, and it stays with them for the long run.

SCOTT BREWSTER: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there’s a vocational psychology construct called career decision making, self advocacy. And that sounds fancy, but we call it career thinking at Hats and Ladders, because it’s a simpler way to say it. But what you just described is exactly what needs to happen. A young person needs to have confidence. They need to know that they can set goals. They need to know how to reach kind of their goals and just feel confident and have the self efficacy to do it. And so what you just described is, is, what the researchers say as well, is that those are kind of the foundations of being able to be successful,

ALEXIS FRANKS: Right, right? Well, we’re definitely helping them make that right step to the in the right direction, we hope. And so Scott, and all of your experience, and all of the things that you’ve seen in the work that you’ve done with youth, what are some actionable ways that we can help youth explore their career options and really focus on gaining some good work experience along with that.

SCOTT BREWSTER: Sure, I think one of the actionable ways that, at least with Hats and Ladders, what we do, is that we feel it’s important for young people to get involved either in some kind of work based experience so early on, try to do some work in something that brings joy to you, or at least is a stepping stone to give you some skills for something you’ll use later. That could be even in the guise of volunteering or an internship. New York is really great. There’s a lot of opportunities for youth to do what I call light interns, internships where they, for example, could enroll in Summer Youth Employment Program, which is serves 100,000 youth and the New York City region over the summer. And so for a lot of young people, it’s their very first work experience. So that is critical, because it actually helps them build a real life context for something they’ve heard about in school. You know, they know you should dress professionally, but the moment that you have to do it, means more. And so I think that would be a good one. The other thing I think that maybe the two of us didn’t have when we were younger is the notion of all this free education online. So if you really are passionate about an area, encourage the youth that you mentor to take an online course. Might. Many of them are free through, for example, Amazon or Google and LinkedIn. Learning there probably there’s a cost to that, but a lot of schools have access to that, and a big one is IBM. IBM now has skills built, which there’s dozens of courses in emerging tech areas such as AI, cloud computing, like the fun, new novel careers that we hear about, and so so many places and spaces young people can get that training to give them a jump start, and that is critical, and they get professional certifications for many of the programs that I just described. But I recommend letting youth know and be aware of those and maybe helping them if they don’t understand how to get started. But those are two kind of big ones, I’d say, is getting that early work experience and then doing some kind of training on your own, because that actually shows that you have the desire to maybe go into one of those fields, because you’re going to go out and do this on your own. No one’s telling you to do it. That’s a big one.

ALEXIS FRANKS: That is big, that is big, and I think there’s so much access now you’re exactly right that we didn’t have prior to you know, you’re waiting to get through high school so that you can do something else and really explore what you want post secondary. But I remember it wasn’t until 11th grade that we even considered things outside of STEM or education, those types of things. So it really online. Online learning has been become a huge piece of just becoming a lifelong learner. And I think it is important for us to encourage youth to always be taking in something, to always learn and grow, and if you have that initiative to do that, that can lead you to a career choice. So it opens up so much for them. I think you’re exactly right, and I’m glad to see that work is happening on the ground, and we’re hoping that it’s happening across the country for everyone. It’s definitely necessary for youth. So Scott, I know we’ve talked a lot today, I’ve got one last question for you. So how can organizations or schools or communities better support mentors and youth in building these career connections?

SCOTT BREWSTER: That’s a great question. One of the things that we just mentioned the work based learning. When I was a senior in high school, we were every senior had to do a work based learning experience. And I think more districts and schools are doing that kind of thing now, which is great, because it forces a young person to get that early experience. But I think if you can, if an organization, our school, whoever you know, I know that probably both types of listeners are tuning in here, I think just make it purposeful and make it meaningful and integrated, because I was lucky enough to be at a school that valued that kind of like work based learning experience before I graduated. But if I wouldn’t have had that, I probably wouldn’t have gained some of those early skills about what it’s like to be in the workforce, I think, make it perfect, purposeful, integrated into the program. Same thing with mentors. You know, obviously create a network of mentors as part of what your organization offers to young people. I know it’s happening here in New York. I don’t necessarily have the visibility across the nation for at least in the CBO space or kind of like the workforce development space. I know it does happen, but schools, I think, are trying to do more of it as well, and then again, provide training and ongoing support for mentors that might work with youth. And then the same thing for youth that work with mentors. How can youth make the most of that mentor? If maybe have a little short workshop with them and say, Hey, we’re going to be working with a mentor this semester. This is what should happen and could happen, but you have to put in your work too. So training on both sides, I think, is important, and then a culture of members of mentorship, I think that we forget, and even when I was at the Youth symposium, would not have the I wasn’t there this year, last year, I was there, and it just was amazing how a lot of the organizations had fostered a culture of mentorship, because they’re learning how important it is. And I loved seeing that, and loved hearing all of the discussions around how critical it is.

ALEXIS FRANKS: Oh yeah, those are some big ones. I think if, if we all can align and really begin creating that culture, and that’s a mind shift for a lot of organizations, schools, communities, but once we really understand how to pass on that knowledge and skills onto the next generation, we’re leaving some really big impact. So I’m hoping you know Scott here on workforce, on the mic, we always have mic drop moments, and you’ve given us so many today, I can’t even go back and describe but I know being a listener, creating that culture of mentorship, those types of things, are key takeaways that we can have an organization. Organizations and communities that will really help us make an impact. So Scott, we appreciate you so much for joining us today on workforce, on the mic, and we’re ready to see you at our next youth symposium, our next event. Keep dropping those nuggets and continue that work that you’re doing with it youth in the youth space. We’re always here to support and we definitely appreciate you.

SCOTT BREWSTER: Well, I appreciate you, Alexis and all the great things that your organization is doing for workforce development across this nation. And I just am excited every time I get one of the newsletters or look at some of the posts that you or others in your organization post on LinkedIn, because it’s inspiring, and I just have to say, keep up the good work, because it’s making a difference.

ALEXIS FRANKS: We will definitely try. Thank you so much, Scott!