Work Based Learning

Thousands of youths and young adults in Kisumu City are facing high rates of unemployment, limiting their early exposure to work and hampering their college and career decisions. They often face a serious challenge: relevant work experience is a prerequisite for many jobs, but it is difficult to gain the required experience without being in the workplace. Work-based learning helps alleviate a common issue for jobseekers: meeting a “relevant work experience” prerequisite that is hard to gain outside of the workplace.

Work-based learning—activities that occur in workplaces through which youth and adults gain the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for entry or advancement in a particular career field—offers a solution to this problem. The recent growth in work-based learning opportunities has been driven in part by employers’ recognition of the role work-based learning can play in addressing the skills gap and in developing a more diverse talent pipeline.

Work-based learning plays a central role in bridging the classroom and the world of work, leading to improved educational and employment outcomes for participants. Work-based learning helps jobless youth contextualize, reinforce, and put into practice their prior learning while crystalizing their education and career goals and improving their immediate and longer-term employment prospects.

But although the benefits of work-based learning are clear, they have accrued primarily to the most highly educated and socially connected segments of the privileged youth and young adults. Most marginalized youth and young adults do not access to opportunities for acquiring relevant work experience.  In recent years, educators and leaders in the workforce development field have returned again and again to the problem of providing work-based learning opportunities to the marginalized populations for whom this experience can mean the most.  

However, challenges related to access threaten to limit the potential of work-based learning to respond to the needs of both employers and underserved populations. A lack of equitable access to work-based learning limits the career prospects and economic mobility of thousands of youths and young adults in Kisumu. It also prevents them from becoming part of the pipeline of skilled workers employers need to help spur local, county and national economic growth.

Achieving the benefits of career pathways and work-based learning for underserved and marginalized youth and young adults, however, requires expanding work-based learning opportunities and removing barriers.  Uneven access to work-based learning threatens to curtail the economic mobility and career prospects of thousands of marginalized youth and young adults in the city. A lack of access to work-based learning can have immediate financial consequences.

 Jobless youth and young adults who do not have opportunities to develop professional and career-track skills offered by work-based learning may struggle to enter and advance in careers. Thousands of vulnerable and at-risk youth and young adults in Kisumu City, especially youth with disabilities, are often unable to access work-based learning opportunities.

The successful design and implementation of work-based learning requires collaboration among a range of workforce, industry, and education stakeholders. Broad-based partnerships to support work-based learning simultaneously reduce the demands on each partner and contribute to the successful development and sustainability of robust work-based learning experiences. Key stakeholders in the design and implementation of effective work-based learning models include employers, educators, the workforce development system and other workforce intermediaries, and community-based organizations engaged in addressing workforce issues.

Better Futures for Children works with donors, foundations, employers, private sector, governments, educational institutions and communities to expand work experience opportunities for thousands of marginalized and jobless youth and young adults in Kisumu City. Better Futures Work-Based Learning Programs seek to achieve outcomes that may include readiness for work and careers, entry to an education or training program, completion of a career-related program of study, degree or credential attainment, job entry, career advancement, and self-sufficiency.

We tailor work- based learning to the needs of specific youths and young adults, and each is designed and implemented so that it incorporates the principles. We design and implement effective models of work-based learning that are informed by the best available research that expand access for the many marginalized youth and young adults in Kisumu City who don’t currently benefit from these opportunities. Our Work-Based Learning programs are grounded on evidence-based principles for effective work-based learning.

Better Futures Work-Based Learning Programs provide an opportunity to marginalized and jobless youth and young adults to gain a better understanding of a particular career and of workplace norms and typical employer expectations for their employees. This is an especially important purpose of internships for high job less college graduates. Participants in Better Futures Work-Based Learning Program gain skills that are valued by employers. These include professional skills such as working as part of a team, being proactive, and understanding workplace expectations. Participants in our work-based learning interventions also have the opportunity to learn and apply specific technical and career-track skills and work with industry-standard equipment and technology, ensuring that they are well-prepared for careers. Development of professional and career-track skills is an important purpose of Better Futures Work-Based Learning Programs.