Years ago, as I was beginning my professional career on Wall Street, I volunteered as a Big Brother in New York City.
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When we think about the workplace, people think about hard skills being dominant, but they're not. The employer realizes knowledge will shift quickly, and there's a half-life to knowledge in this world.
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The Opportunity Divide doesn't just keep our students disconnected from the mainstream economy; it prevents our businesses from growing.
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When it comes to expanding opportunity, businesses and young adults are not the sources of the problem - they are a substantial part of the solution.
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It's not always the case that doing what's right is also doing what's smart, but when it is, the question of 'what to do' should be pretty simple.
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The saying in business is that, 'You hire for skills and you fire for behavior.' And one would argue that in order to move up in career, to be promoted, to take on additional responsibility, in many ways that's linked more to the attitudes and behaviors that you carry rather than what you know technically about a given subject.
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Many of our students say, 'We wish we had a mentor in high school. We wish we had someone we could spend more time with, who paid more attention to us, who I could sit down with and talk to when I had a problem.' So relationships are critical.
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You can learn what you want to learn through hard work. And a good employer will teach you what you want to learn as long as you show the right attitude and behaviors.
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As we say at Year Up all the time, investing in our young people is not just a matter of economic justice. It's good business sense.
