Skills for Career Advancement (SCA)

About the iMentor SCA Series

Purpose

The iMentor SCA program is a series of monthly workshops designed to take students with no job experience (and very limited knowledge of what it takes to acquire a job) and provide them with the training and skills necessary to be strong candidates for internships and job opportunities by the end of one program year. There are seven SCA trainings in every program year.

Need

Employment statistics indicate that there is a strong need for students in our target population to receive training of this nature. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of November 2005, the national unemployment rate for white teens (age 16-19) was 13.9 percent, as compared to 16.9 percent for Hispanics and 38.8 percent for blacks. According to the Vocational Foundation, New York City teenagers are twice as likely to be unemployed as their national counterparts, and a recent report by the Community Service Society found that the unemployment rate for New York City teenagers increased from 19 percent to 28.7 percent between 2000 and 2003. The same report found that in 2003, barely one-half (51.8 percent) of New York City’s black men and only 57.1 percent of the city’s black women were employed, as compared to 75.7 percent of white men and 61.4 percent of white women.

Given that iMentor has a 92 percent minority student population, it is our hope that by enhancing mentees’ career readiness skills, the SCA program will help mentees increase their chances of attaining meaningful employment opportunities during high school and beyond.

Program Overview

The SCA program will meet one afternoon a month throughout the school year (for a total of seven sessions) at the iMentor office, and will be available to all mentees. Make-up materials will be available for mentees who cannot make a particular date/time.

Session topics will include:

Sessions will be facilitated by iMentor staff, as well as career counselors from local colleges. In addition, the sessions focusing on interview skills will be co-facilitated by professional human resources specialists from a range of industries, as well as volunteer adult mentors and guest speakers from local businesses including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Starbucks.

Mentees who attend all seven sessions will be guaranteed an interview for an iMentor-sponsored internship. While we cannot guarantee an internship placement for all eligible mentees (due to limited availability), we will do everything we can to secure as many iMentor-sponsored internships as possible.

Outcomes

The SCA program will provide mentees with practical, hands-on, career skills training in every session. Thus, even though the program serves as a year-long, cumulative workshop, mentees will benefit from the program regardless of whether they attend all seven sessions (each session will provide comprehensive information about its one particular topic/skill set). In either case, mentees will leave SCA sessions empowered with greater knowledge, skills, and confidence to help them attain success along their career pathway. SCA’s desired outcome is that mentees feel completely prepared to identify, apply for, and successfully attain meaningful employment opportunities in the immediate future, as well as throughout their adult lives.

For more information about the SCA workshop series, please contact Unique Fraser at unique@imentor.org (212-461-4330 x23)

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