Expanding the Year Up United Model
Year Up United is a national workforce development organization dedicated to expanding access to economic opportunity for young adults ages 18 to 29 and providing business and talent solutions to companies to reshape the world of work.
Year Up United’s job training is organized into four unique Career Pathways: Business, Customer Experience, IT, and Software—designed to serve employers’ talent needs and market demands. Participants are trained in both technical and durable skills, preparing them for a range of cross-industry roles. Curricula are regularly updated based on employer input and labor market research.
Since its inception in 2000, Year Up United has served over 52,000 students, with over 72% of graduates employed and/or enrolled in postsecondary education within 4 months of program completion.
Year Up United has created a variety of alternative program pathways intended to serve a wider population of students with differing skill levels and needs. However, Year Up United’s time-intensive assessment processes have made efficient placement difficult and limited their ability to serve a broader population of students.
Partnering to Assess and Improve Year Up United
To address this challenge, the PROPEL Center at AIR partnered with Year Up United to co-develop assessment tools that can more systematically identify students’ workplace readiness skills and needs, allowing Year Up United to provide more tailored support. A team of I/O researchers at AIR is building a suite of tools that can be used to evaluate students’ skills when they enter the program and determine the type of training necessary for student success.
In the future, PROPEL hopes to develop similar evaluation tools to track students’ skills as they progress through the program, providing a more accurate picture of their workplace readiness to prospective employers. Our goal is that these types of skills-based measures can be used by the wider field, allowing employers to more accurately assess individuals’ skills, diversify their pool of candidates, and improve access to high-wage jobs.
PROPEL is also working to understand how Year Up United supports their success. We will share lessons from this work, along with research on the effectiveness of the new assessment system, with the larger workforce field.
The PROPEL Center is directly supported by the AIR Opportunity Fund.
