On Thursday April 22, 2010, YouthLINK, PA Career Link, Eastside Neighborhood Employment Center, YouthWorks, and urban Youth Action will join forces to sponsor the fourth Youth Career Fair at the Omni William Penn Hotel from 1:00 p.m.- 4:30 p.m. High school juniors and senior, freshman and sophomore college students, and other entry-level workers are encouraged to attend.

Youth will have the opportunity to meet hiring employers, post-secondary institutions, and experts from the workforce development sector. Each youth attendee will receive a career fair bag filled with gifts and have the chance to win door prizes!

We will be happy to answer any questions you might have and assist you in any way possible 412-390-2441.

Click on the link below to watch our PA eMentoring skit on the Smart Futures YouTube channel!

PA eMentoring Skit (YouTube Video)

UPMC employees partner with online mentoring program

Tuesday January 19, 2010

By Joe Symdo

Gina Monaco long had thought about becoming a mentor, but doubted she had the time and energy to do it.

When University of Pittsburgh Medical Center encouraged employees to begin mentoring high school students by e-mail, she jumped at the chance and quickly was paired with a local high school student interested in psychology.

“I signed up and didn’t give it a second thought,” said Ms. Monaco, who handles insurance reviews at UPMC’s Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.

UPMC’s endorsement of PA eMentoring is a big boost to Smart Futures, the Downtown nonprofit group that launched the program last school year. The partnership with UPMC was announced last week.

UPMC has 50,000 employees, giving the mentoring the program the potential to reach thousands of additional students across the state, Smart Futures executive director David Mosey said. Also, because the UPMC work force is so varied, it can offer students guidance on numerous career choices, including the skilled trades and technical fields.

Already, at least 100 UPMC employees have signed up. Ms. Monaco, who has a bachelor’s degree in child development and a master’s in psychology, said the goal with her student will be to “just open her eyes to the possibilities” of a psychology career.

Each week, the student and adult complete an online exercise designed to set the stage for a career-related discussion. Students participate for 10 weeks and finish the program with a personalized college and career plan.

By the end of the school year, Mr. Mosey said, he hopes to have reached more than 1,000 students in dozens of schools across the region. He said he hopes to have about 150 employers in his network by then.

Mr. Mosey said the program helps students understand “who they are, where they’re going and how to get there.” Partly because online mentoring is convenient, many of the mentors stay on for another 10-week cycle with another student.

“You’re talking about two e-mails a week,” Mr. Mosey said.

Smart Futures still is seeking college students, workers and retirees to serve as mentors. Prospective mentors can sign up at www.pa-ementor.org.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10019/1029242-298.stm?cmpid=news.xml#ixzz0d4blawNM

Inside Higher Education                 

 January 4, 2010

http://www.insidehighered.com/   

Many discussions of efforts to diversify the faculty ranks include concerns about whether female and minority academics need mentors. Advocates for female and minority professors say that white men are more likely to learn informally from senior (male) colleagues about how to get ahead. Some skeptics dismiss these ideas, and suggest that the best scholarship gets published and the best academics rise through the ranks.

Academics who have had good mentors have over the years praised their impact, and those without them have talked about falling behind. But is there proof that mentoring matters in launching faculty careers — and that it could make a difference for faculty diversity?

A study presented in Atlanta Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association may be the first truly random sample to try to test the mentor impact — and the study may demonstrate that mentoring truly does matter.

The research tracks the careers of women who participated (and some who were turned away from participating) in a mentoring program sponsored by the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession. The mentoring program connects junior female economists with senior faculty mentors for a two-day workshop held in conjunction with the economics association’s annual meeting. The workshops feature discussions about publishing and grant writing and offer critiques of a draft article or grant proposal. In the study, applicants to the program were randomly selected for participation or to be in the control group, and were told that there was not enough room in the program for all applicants.

Cohorts from 2004 and 2006 have now been tracked for five years and three years, respectively, and the study compares the female economists who received the mentoring and those who didn’t — women who were seen as otherwise having a similar range of abilities. Before participating (or not participating) in the study, those in the group receiving mentoring and in the control group showed no differences in the numbers of grants received or publications.

Comparing the participants and non-participants in the years since the mentoring took place, the study found significant gains for those who received mentoring in three key factors: total number of publications, total number of publications in “top tier” journals, and total number of federal grants won.

The study says that not enough time has passed to see if these achievements translate into higher rates of tenure and promotion. But the paper notes that, historically, the tenure rates for female economists have lagged those of men, and that publication and grants are key to receiving tenure. Some research, the paper says, suggests that mentoring may be particularly important in closing the gender gap in tenure rates. This research suggests that female economists lack the “research networks” of their male counterparts, and notes that even though co-authorship is common in the discipline, female economists are less likely to write pieces with colleagues than are men (even after controlling for publication rates).

— Scott Jaschik

We would like to thank everyone who participated in UPMC’s Dignity and Respect Month. As of October 31st, 4793 people took the pledge to promote inclusion through dignity and respect. A total of 1671 of them were in Smart Futures’ name.

As winners of the contest, UPMC will grant Smart Futures a day of service. We will keep you updated as the day draws near!

Thanks we could not have done it without you, 

Smart Futures Team 

Help us win a day of service! 

Friends of Smart Futures:

Thank you for supporting Smart Futures mission of making career education a part of every Pennsylvania classroom.

October has been designated “Dignity & Respect Month” by UPMC. The campaign promotes inclusion in the community and the workplace by demonstrating dignity and respect. We are giving our full support and you can too! Take the peldge to support inclusion by treating everyone with dignity and respect. Visit the website below to learn more about promoting this campaign and helping Smart Futures win a day of service with the most pledges!
 

2 Easy Steps! Take the pledge by October 31st!

 Just log onto: http://www.dignityandrespectcampaign.com/takepledge.php
Type in your name in the “blank space,” and then choose “Smart Futures” as your organziation.

Help us win a day of service from UPMC!

(Pittsburgh, PA) Imagine this. A parent and a student sit down together at a computer. The student keys in a username and password and together they discover that the student has the reading skill set to become a Pharmacist making $63,030 per year. Across town, another parent and another student realize that she has the math skills to follow her dream of becoming an electrician like her father. In downtown Pittsburgh, a human resource manager is posting jobs and internships to a website knowing she is reaching out to applicants who have the key workplace skills required to do the job. This is reality in Pittsburgh. During the 2001-2002 academic year, nearly 3,000 10th grade students in Pittsburgh Public Schools participated in the Keys2Work skills-oriented career exploration program for the purpose of seeing where their current skills can be used in today’s job market as well as what opportunity lies ahead through further training.

Keys2Work, a non-profit project of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania, provided the basic skill assessments and related online, skills-based career exploration activities to Pittsburgh Public School students through a grant provided by The Pittsburgh Foundation. The regional Keys2Work program is underwritten by Richard King Mellon Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, and Mellon Financial Corporation Foundation.

Unique to the Keys2Work program is a mailing to the parents and/or guardians of these students. It will be distributed jointly this week by Keys2Work and the Career Development Department of the Pittsburgh Public Schools. The mailing emphasizes to students and their parents the relationship between the basic skills learned in school and the basic skill requirements for any occupation.

The mailing provides parents three important pieces of information: 1) a summary of the Keys2Work program and how it impacts their student, 2) statistics from the Human Capital Policy Initiative at the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics which outline the workforce and population trends of our region, and 3) instructions on how to access the www.keys2work.com website from home or at the Carnegie Public Library of Pittsburgh to those who need free Internet access.

Whether a student plans to enter the workforce after high school or after college, Keys2Work provides students and their parents the opportunity to see how academic accomplishments build upon themselves against the real needs of the workplace. According to Keys2Work Executive Director, David Mosey, “The goal of Keys2Work is to help students and their parents realize that what they learn in school really does matter. We do that by relating students’ academic achievement to the needs of jobs. Think of it as Pittsburgh’s SAT test for the workplace. It sounds simple, but it may be the very first time a parent sees how what the student has learned in school is directly tied to economic opportunity.”

In December, 10th grade students in the Pittsburgh Public Schools completed the first component of the Keys2Work program by taking three assessments from ACT’s WorkKeys® system: Reading for Information, Applied Mathematics, and Locating Information.

These assessments, which measure reading, mathematics, and graphic interpretation skills, are used nationally in workforce development and education programs. Their purpose is to measure a student’s ability to apply what they’ve learned in school to solving common work-related problems and to inform the student of his/her basic skills work-readiness. Employers can also use these assessments for identifying, recruiting and hiring qualified job applicants.

At the end of the school year, each tenth grader received a score report, a user ID and a password for the Keys2Work website. In this week’s mailing, parents are encouraged to explore the website directly with their student. Students can examine jobs that match their current skills levels as well as pinpoint gaps where greater skill development is needed.

Students can also review skills, abilities, knowledge, working conditions, personal characteristics associated with each job, employers in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region who hire for these jobs, and where these job openings currently exist in our region.

During the summer months, through a joint program with the Carnegie Public Library, students are encouraged to come to the library to explore the website and use training materials designed to improve their skills and expand their career opportunities. Keys2Work also provides each school with the training materials to address identified skill gaps.

Including all high schools in the Pittsburgh Public School District, the Keys2Work program is currently being used in 32 high schools throughout Allegheny County. In total, nearly 5,000 high school sophomores participated in the skills assessment-career exploration program. Based in Pittsburgh, Keys2Work is also being utilized nationally. In Jacksonville, Florida, Keys2Work has partnered with the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce. Over 50 high schools and almost 7,000 high school seniors are participating. Other Keys2Work projects are also in place in Syracuse, NY, St. Louis, MO, and in eastern Arkansas. # # #