Julie Shields-Rutyna: right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. My name is Julie Shields Rutina, and I’m the Director of College Planning, Education, and Training at MIFA, and we’re so happy to bring you this webinar this afternoon to help you learn about Mass Hire Young Adult Career Center Services.

And I Met our presenters recently, and I’m so thrilled that they’re they’ve agreed to present for you to share all the services and the work that they do. And hopefully that will help you and help your students. Um, so, um, I think, I think you’ll get a lot out of today. Let me just tell you about. The questions, if you have questions, please put them in the Q and a section.

I’ll keep track of those and then I can pose them to the presenters. If you would like to see if you’d like closed captioning, press the button and you’ll get a live transcript of the words that we’re speaking. On the screen. And in fact, you can even choose the language that you see those those words in so that’s another feature.

And if you need to leave, just know that tomorrow we’re going to send you a copy of the recording and the slides. So you’ll have those so you don’t have to take too many. Manual notes right now. So our presenters, um, are Heather Donovan, who is young adult career center manager in Lowell and Emily McMillan, who is the program manager for Mass Hire downtown Boston.

So I think I will turn it right over to you, Heather, and, um, they can tell you a little bit more about themselves

Heather Donovan: as well. Hello, everybody. I’m Heather Donovan from the Mass Hire Lowell Young Adult Career Center. Thank you so much for joining us here today. We’re very excited to share a little bit of information and please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments that you might have.

I’m happy to, um, Answer them as they come in, or as they’re seen. Uh, so, I thought we’d start off with a little bit of background about Mass Hire. Um, I have been with the Mass Hire system, which is the Department of Career Services system as a whole, if you’ve heard of that. For a little over 10 years and actually began the young adult career center here in the greater little area with my staff that I had on board at the time, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later.

Previous to that I had worked in some nonprofits and always really worked with young people so. When the opportunity arose to build out young adult programs here in Lowell, I jumped on it pretty aggressively and moved forward. And again, we’ll talk a little bit more about the center here afterwards. So some background on Mass Hire, it is, um, It’s a sort of dual relationship between what’s called workforce boards and career centers.

There are 16 different workforce areas across the state and so along with that is 16 different workforce boards and they sort of oversee the implementation of career center services. The career centers themselves are the the link basically between The Department of Career Services, the workforce boards and the initiatives that they take and the workers, employers, people looking for work, young people looking for training or basically anybody in a situation where they’d like to upskill themselves.

We’re going to move on to, um, just a little map of, uh, Massachusetts. And so all these blue dots are actually places in which you can find a career center across the state. And in the next slide, you’ll see the names of all the career centers. And again, you are getting these after the fact, so you don’t necessarily have to keep track of them.

But each career center has, uh, what’s called the service delivery area. And so each Um, just because someplace says that they are, for instance, Massauer Greater Lowell, it actually encompasses way more than just Lowell, so, um, you can go ahead and search in Google if you’re not sure of your career center that’s located near you, and the closest one should pop up when you write in your town.

If not, there is a listing of these and Also happy to share that as well, but each career center has a service delivery area that includes multiple towns and cities within their region.

So along with that is noting that while Mass Hire itself is a branded name across the state, each of the centers operates a little bit differently. Um, again, the service delivery area comes up. Um, what’s called a regional blueprint and that is what the workforce board works on to decide what are the key areas of employment and needs in your service delivery area.

Um, and each career center has the ability to write for different grant funding. Which obviously dictates how they operate and what programs they run. There’s also some money that’s allocated from the state. And that varies based on career center, service delivery area, and the services delivered as well.

And then each center has a little bit different capacity. So, um, that size wise, staff wise, location, um, and really how they’re working. So some are remote, some are hybrid, and some are fully in person. Um, Mass hire rebranded itself from a variety of different career centers that all had different names a few years ago to Be able to be really a brand in the state.

And so that people started to recognize Mass Hire, whether they were in the Boston area or whether they were out West in Springfield. So as a whole, at its core, it provides services to people who are looking to skill up in some way, shape or form, but how that is offered is often very different. So. I’m going to go into talking a little bit about Lowell and Emily, who will join us after, after is going to talk a little bit more about Boston.

So, um, just understanding that some of the things that we discussed might not be available at some of the career centers, depending on your location, but chances are there’s something pretty similar

though. The, uh, greater Lowell workforce area. So here you’ll see our service delivery area is Billerica, Chelmsford, Dracut, Dunstable, Lowell, Tewksbury, Kingsborough, and Westford. So we are Greater Lowell, and that does encompass a bunch of different towns and cities in our area. We operate under the direction of the Greater Lowell Workforce Board, as I had stated above.

And, um, we implement sort of all of the initiatives and programs that filter down. And then we also take it upon ourselves to look for new opportunities that might work and cultivate business relationships. Uh, we’re out into the community. We’re working with educational institutions doing job fairs.

We’re sitting, um, at out of school use offices. We work with community based organizations, labor unions, government agencies and economic development of all of the towns and cities in our S, our service delivery area in order to figure out the need and how we can help to fill that.

So here’s our center, the Mass Higher Low Young Adult Career Center. Uh, so we have a site and a space on there where you can sort of see more about our staff. Uh, we were, you can, you can go ahead and move forward. We were founded officially in um, 2021, but we had been building up much for many years, sort of before that.

So we are one of less than a handful of centers across the state that cater strictly to young people. So we offer services to young adults between 14 to 24 25, depending on the programming. Um, we are standalone and considered an affiliate career center. So we offer all the same services that an adult would get and an adult center, but just with a young.

adult vibe to it. So we’re a little more colorful, a little more fun, um, a little less talky. And, um, we have a, a wide range of young staff people who can really relate to the participants and customers who come through our door here.

So some of the things that we do here for young people, we do a host specialized guest speaker events. So we’ll have drop in nights. Uh, we’ll have, uh, how to start your own business, financial education. We do a lot of soft skills building. So we work on the things that are lacking, uh, when we talk to employers, such as like collaboration, taking constructive criticism.

Um, communicating with people who are different from you, sort of those things that aren’t necessarily in a hard skills training, but are more on the soft skills side. And then we do some of that hard skills stuff as well. So, um, we’ll do resume writing, career exploration activities. We do mock interviews.

And then we have a resource room where young people can come in, and they have access to a computer. Um, that has Internet and they can do, uh, training such as interplay, which is, um, a sort of hands on opportunity to learn about some of the skilled trades. Um, and then we have CPR for state programs that they can do online and sort of some of those stackable buildable, uh, certifications they can come in and do right here in the resource room.

Some of the things that we have grants for that we have written for, so some of our specialized programs here in Lowell, um, we run pretty expansive work experience programs, and what that is, is a combination of that soft skills training that I was discussing earlier, and that on the job skills, um, that comes with working over on a job while also learning the skills.

So we partner with about 70 different employers who will host between 450 and 550 young people a year, which actually turns back around about 1. 2 million dollars to young people by way of wages and then into the community. So it is very, um, economic driven. For both the young people but also for the communities in which we run these programs is it filters money back in.

Um, and then we also run a pre employment transition services program and this is specifically for young people on IEPs or 504s at seven of our partner schools. And this is in conjunction with the Mass Rehabilitation Commission. To really sort of bolster that, let those light touch soft skills and, um, hope to have that first sort of look into after high school for young people who are of varying abilities.

And then we run a young parent program. Um, and that can be a high school equivalency, which is a high setter GED. We have that classroom right here on site. Uh, life skills, parenting skills, occupational training, job search assistance. And that program is with the Department of Transitional Assistance. So that is for young women.

and fathers who have Children or are pregnant and are looking to upskill themselves in order to move forward on their career pathway. Uh, new this year to us is a skillet program with the Department of Youth Services. So this is a workforce readiness, um, program that comes with work experience as well as some occupational training.

And this is strictly for young people who are committed to the Department of Youth Services. So they can be in a residential home. They could. Be, um, in the community in their own apartment or something of that nature, but they do have to be involved with the Department of Youth Services and request this service.

We also do what’s called pathways coaching here with several alternative and charter high schools in the area where. We go in and almost as a, almost like a guidance counselor, but for careers. So we will work with students on planning and mapping their pathway. So how they’re doing in school, what they need to graduate, where they would like to go and, um, short, medium and long term goals and set them up on how to attain those things so that when they leave school, they have a plan as to how they want to move forward.

And then we also run, uh, an out of school youth program under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, otherwise known as WIOA, which is a federally funded program to help young people pursue their goals and move forward. These are barrier based programs, so young people have to, um, have a variety of barriers in order to be enrolled in these programs, and this one in particular also enrolls young people in the.

High Set GED classroom or an occupational training program such as HVAC, CNA, LASH technician, which is new to us this year, or really anything that’s of interest to them. So that’s a little bit about the Lowell Career Center and the workforce system as a whole. I am going to go ahead and turn it over to Emily who is going to tell you about her and the Boston area.

Emily MacMillan: Hi, everyone. Thank you. Heather. My name’s Emily Macmillan. I’m the program manager of the young adult career center services at mass higher downtown Boston. Um, we are a much newer program. Um, we were chartered by our workforce development board, like. Heather was speaking about, um, just this spring, and I joined the team as the program manager in June.

So our program’s been launched for just about six months now. Um, but we serve young adults in the greater Boston area. If we could just move this slide.

That’s Heather’s.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Sorry about that. Yeah. So, all right, we’ll put that up at the end too.

Emily MacMillan: There we go. Um, and so this is our team. Um, our director, Tasha, um, is over on the right. Um, and then we have three, what we call career navigators. Adani, Brianna, and Kaisha are our navigators. They’re coaches who work with, um, young adults who come in to meet with us.

We have two, um, Now, three actually outreach specialists with the support of our workforce development board. And we also have an employer engagement specialist who focuses on our employer partnerships and relationships from the perspective of making sure that we’re forming those relationships that will benefit our young adults and help them to achieve the jobs and the career pathways that they’re looking for.

Um, so. And these are two of our navigators on the left. Uh, our mission is to help the young adults in Boston between 18 and 24, who are looking to explore career pathways, uh, training opportunities, um, and get on paths towards financial stability for themselves and their families. Um, the two examples I always give are we can help a young adult who walks in the door and says, I have no idea what I want to do.

I don’t know how to find out, I don’t know how to do the research to find out what’s out there, or even what I’m a good fit for, and then on the other end of the spectrum, I have a client who, when I first met with her, she said, I want to be a 9 1 1 dispatcher, I have a resume, I have a connection in that field, I need help building up my confidence for the interviews that I’m going to do.

You know, hoping to get soon and then kind of anything in between, um, anything related to job planning, job searching, career pathway planning, and also researching and finding low, low cost, ideally free training opportunities and workforce development opportunities that will help our clients get to where they want to go.

Um, we are services located within mass hire downtown Boston. One of the benefits of that is we can help connect our clients to all of the other services within Mass Hire Downtown Boston. So some of those other services are on this slide here. We have our team as a whole has a resource center where people can come and work on the computers, a general resource center and a young adult resource center.

Mass Hire Downtown offers It offers Webinars multiple webinars every week that we can refer our clients to in addition to the in person programming that we offer. Um, our employer engagement team is they have 2 events. I believe this week that are, you know, a virtual job fair employer events and employer panels.

Um, so there’s a lot of different services within mass higher downtown Boston as a whole that we can, um. That we’re able to access and utilize for our clients in addition to what our team can provide.

Um, and, you know, again, our focus is really on the 1 on 1 support. I think that’s 1 of the big differences. I would say on our team, our navigators work 1 on 1 for an extensive period of time with those with the clients who come in for as long as they need it, um, to get to get to that next step. To get them to the point where they feel confident, um, that they’re on that pathway towards a career, um, or towards, you know, working in the field, um, that they’re, that they’re looking for.

Um, and that comes through obviously resumes and a lot of other things as well. So on this screen, I did a very poor job of cutting and pasting, but one of the things we can do kind of on that first of the spectrum that I was talking about, a young adult who comes in and says, I don’t even really know where to start.

I don’t know what’s out there. I don’t know what I’m a good fit for. We have a list of about 10, I believe, initial assessments that are on all of the computers in our young adult room where they can look at, you know, what do my interests make me a good match for? What do my transferable skills potentially make me a good match for?

What about Realistic salary assessments and what careers will get me that salary that I need for myself and my family. So assessments are one thing that, you know, we, we look at with young adults and coach them through. And on the next slide. And I’ll just

Julie Shields-Rutyna: say something here that you know what this slide says to me, you do a lot.

Emily MacMillan: Thank you. We try. And one of those things that we also do to help people discover what’s out there is we have some of these headsets that help young adults explore as well. So we have in person programming every other week right now, where clients can come in and just try out these virtual reality headsets.

And we have, um, Career exploration software on there. So you just go in you pick like an industry and then a particular task within that industry and you get the experience of actually trying it out. I’ve done it. It’s crazy. I was scared. I was going to walk into a wall. I did not. I changed the oil on a car.

It’s really cool. And this is something that We have young adults coming back regularly to try this out and to get this experience, not only to do, you know, one type of job that they think they want to do, but also just it gives you a sense of all the things that are out there that you might not have even thought of.

So that’s another tool that our team has access to. And then the next slide. Um, we also help with quote, unquote, the basics, right? So we have a resume template, cover letter templates, LinkedIn coaching, all of our coaches are go through an extensive training process on all of these pieces and provide a lot of training.

Really detailed coaching around developing the resume, developing the cover letter, doing mock interviews, um, Starting and or developing a LinkedIn profile as well. So, um, again, depending on where the young adult comes in the door, Um, all of these things are our items that we coach them around. And the next, um, and then, like, I was mentioning before, um, we also really focus a lot on training.

So, even before I started 1 of our team members put together this really extensive document that has probably hundreds of, um. Training programs in the greater Boston area that are low cost or free. Um, that can help people, uh, you know, who, if they say, I think I want to do it, but I don’t even know where to start.

We have, I think, like, 25 programs around greater Boston that are right now offering training and development and it healthcare. Culinary construction and trades. Um, life sciences is a big growing industry in Boston. So we’re able to share that information with them. In addition to helping them explore, of course, just like general career prospects and also all of the different employers.

In our area that we have connections to, you know, that can help them kind of spark an initial idea and start exploring what they might want to do.

Um, and this is just an I wanted to show what our employer partnership page looks like. So again, this is a page that all of mass hire downtown uses on our website, but we have so many employer partnerships and relationships that they’ve broken it down into these multiple sectors and so what we’re able to do with our clients.

Thanks. If a client comes in and says, you know, I, um, I have a couple of clients interested in security jobs right now. So we can click on the security page and the employers listed there and the specific job openings listed. There are jobs that obviously I coach them around preparing to apply and applying, but then I reach out to our employer engagement team and they’re able to put in a warm referral.

So it just helps our clients. Get a bit of a leg up. Um, and they ha they’re able to take full advantage of all those employer partnerships that Mass hire downtown Boston has. And I think then Oh, yep. And these are just some examples of some training programs. Um, we have referred or in the pro are in the process of referring our clients to, um.

These training programs as well as multiple other training programs within the, um, city of Boston. So I just wanted to give some examples, uh, and resilient coders are both within the I. T. field. J. V. S. is a workforce development agency that, um, mass hired downtown actually operates within within and we J.

V. S. has training programs within. Uh, healthcare, early childhood education, animal care, and vet care, uh, a lot of, um, customer service. There’s a lot of different things we can help young adults plug into, basically, depending on how the coaching goes with them.

And this is just one page that gives you the visual of what that, um, that, um, employer engagement page looks like. So we can go in with young adults, not just say, there are a lot of opportunities within healthcare in Boston, we can give them specific examples and talk them through. We have a connection with Brigham and Women’s.

Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how we can help you network within Brigham and Women’s and discover, is that the employer that I want to explore and look at? So, it’s great that we’re able to take advantage of and, and rely on the larger team within Mass Hire Downtown Boston that builds these relationships as well.

And so, I’ll just end on this is how you can get started connecting with us. Um, this screen right here is the Mass Higher Downtown Boston homepage and then we have a young adults page. Um, so if you go to the young adults page, you’ll then that one of the first things you see on the screen is that blue button that says schedule a meeting with a coach.

The young adult can then choose. We do both on site and virtual so they select which option they prefer. And then it’ll show them all the times available that all of our career navigators have, um, and they can book a time to meet with us. And I think the next page, yep, this is our contact information, um, and that QR code takes them to that website where they can connect with a coach.

Um, but I’m also happy to share my, um, individual information as well, if that would be helpful. Um, so. Thank you very much for for having me and allowing us to share about our young adult career center services Well,

Julie Shields-Rutyna: thank you so much, Emily and Heather. I’m going to leave this up for a few seconds, and then I’m going to go back and share the contact for Lowell.

And if you both, yeah, if you want to put your contact information in the chat, I will then put it in the Q& A, or actually, you can put it in the chat and everyone will be able to get that. It’s a one way chat at this point on this, but if you put it in the chat, people will be able to see that, I believe, or at least I will, and I’ll I’ll, I’ll send it out or we can say it out loud.

And yes, I’m going to see if I can take any questions. So we do have a nice group on the, on the webinar. What questions do you have? Do you have any questions for Heather and Emily about these services, about how to, um, You know, make sure that that your students take advantage of all of these resources.

Very, very impressive number of resources.

I’m going to try one by one here. I’m going to put Heather’s information in the Q and a let’s see. Oh, I guess I can’t. Maybe we’ll just say them out loud. Um, so Heather Donovan is Heather dot Donovan mass higher Lowell. cc.com

and Emily is e Macmillon, M-A-C-M-I-L-L-A-N at Mass Hire downtown boston.org. So very, very much descriptive.

Emily MacMillan: I think mass hire likes to have the longest email.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Let me let me ask you this. So, I mean, I’m just so impressed that there’s so much here for a student. To come in and just say, okay, let me have a conversation. Let me get started here. So many options for me. Um, are a lot of the students you see probably sent from school counselors because school counselors know about your services to do they find just students find you in any other ways or young folks find you in any other ways.

And, um, do most, this is a lot of questions at once, but do most come with kind of an open mind, like, can you help me? Or do people come with, with more specific

Heather Donovan: asks? Yeah, so, um, all great questions. I think it varies depending on, um, the young person, obviously, but along with the schools making direct referrals, community organizations that young people are involved in also will send young people over here.

And we’ve We’ve come to a place where we have a pretty large network of young people who are familiar with us and so the word of mouth travels very quickly, which I think probably is more effective than anything else. When a young person hears from another young person that they should go, because they’ll get help, they are much more likely to actually come and see us.

I also have a A street outreach team. So I have a group of young people who are in MassHire Swag and are out when school gets out and are sort of walking the streets and getting people interested in the programs. And because they’re also young people, again, they’re much more likely to trust that person than, um, than not.

And, um, Most young people come in here having absolutely no idea why they’re even here. Uh, so that’s wonderful because that allows all of those things that Emily shared, those explorations and things like that to really, uh, be really very useful for, for a young person on the flip side to some of the older young people know exactly what they want to do is as Emily had said, and, um, come in with a plan and just don’t know how to execute it.

And they just need that final execution piece. Wow,

Julie Shields-Rutyna: that’s so wonderful. I’m going to go back right here just to put up the Lowell information. I’ll end show and see if I can go up and find that right here so that you have that information as well.

And anything else, anything else from attendees?

Well, anyway, Heather, Emily, thank you so much. This is terrific information and we will, we will promote this for sure, so that young people know about about. All of these resources and send them to you. And I know I know others on the on the webinar will do the same and we really appreciate it. And thank you all for attending this afternoon and have a good rest

Heather Donovan: of the day.

Thank you for having us. Thank you.

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