Job Skills and Minority Youth

Barton J. Hirsch is Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Illinois. He has written two previous books on youth programs, A Place to Call Home: After-School Programs for Urban Youth and After-School Centers and Youth Development: Case Studies of Success and Failure (with Nancy L. Deutsch and David L. DuBois), which both received the Social Policy Award for Best Authored Book from the Society for Research on Adolescence.

• 1. Preparing youth for work; 2. Do youth in After School Matters have more marketable job skills?; 3. A comparison of the strongest and the weakest apprenticeships; 4. Which apprenticeship has the best model for scaling up?; 5. What human resource interviewers told us about youth employability; 6. A program for teaching youth how to do well in job interviews; 7. Guidelines for the future; Appendix 1: the impact of After School Matters on positive youth development, academics, and problem behavior; Appendix 2: the Northwestern mock job interview.

'Clearly written and accessible to a wide audience, Job Skills and Minority Youth is an original and valuable contribution to two fields that are ordinarily separate: youth development and employment training. One of the most distinctive and promising aspects of the program described in this book is its enlistment of representatives from 'primary' labor market firms - HR officers - to aid in training and testing disadvantaged youth. This is a bridge few programs build. The 'backward mapping' scheme laid out by Hirsch serves as both a succinct summary of the logic of the program and a clear rationale for focusing efforts on what matters most in helping to open opportunities for young people from Chicago's poorest neighborhoods and for others from comparable communities.' Stephen F. Hamilton, Cornell University, New York