The ASE Group

The Australian School of Employment is an initiative of The ASE Group - a community-led and purpose driven business for good that delivers education, entrepreneurship and employment programs to young people aged 5 to 24 years.

Within the Australian School of Employment, we deliver a program called 'Creating Your Future Job' - an interactive, educational and exciting self-employment program for young people aged 10 to 24 years. During the program, participants identify a local, community problem, brainstorm a micro-business solution (to ensure that the business solutions are super practical and realistic without large investment) and work towards making an income through self-employment.

For many young people, especially disengaged/disadvantaged youth including those who have experience in the criminal justice system and regional youth, self-employment really is a practical and variable career pathway. They're in control and they're in the drivers seat - they are quite literally creating their future jobs. 

We believe entrepreneurship and self-employment can truly solve youth unemployment amongst this target group.

We truly are a community-led and purpose driven organisation working towards solving youth unemployment in a super innovative and exciting way.

We conduct co-design in a very real and authentic fashion. For example, we work with our target cohort when we design the curriculum, each activity, lesson plans and delivery style.

The facilitators who deliver our programs are young people too - the model is based on young people, working with other young people to build up their micro-business skills. In the classroom, we create authentic connections through trust and respect. We build strong relationships with participants as mates, opposed to a traditional teacher-student relationship, and have seen that by understanding each young person and their circumstances we can tailor programs in order to maximise long-term benefits. 

Overall, young people are truly at the centre of what we do (everyone says that but we truly embody it). Our team is young, our team have quite literally experienced most of the problems our young people have experienced and we build program WITH young people, rather than just simply FOR them.

Our theory of change has two components:

1. That an increase in short-term life skills from a young age will have an impact on long-term poverty. 
2. That our program will help participants start real micro-businesses and become self-employed. 

Our program and individual workshop activities are based on the clear needs of our young cohort and where possible, best practise research.

The first component of our theory of change is universally accepted - when we intervene early and offer young people who do not have life skills, the opportunity to learn, their long term employment prospects rise significantly. While the goal of the program is self-employment, the skills participants learn during the program are timeless and transferrable and can be taken to multiple career pathways and employment pathways. 

Secondly, we target streams of our youth self-employment program to young offenders for multiple reasons. According to a report from Nobel Prize nominated economist William Baumol, the personality traits of people who commit crime are very similar to that of successful entrepreneurs and business leaders such as intrapreneurs. In his renowned essay “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive”, Baumol says that many would-be entrepreneurs end up criminals due to educational and economic inequalities. The participants we’re targeting in our program do come from significant disadvantages and have been raised with multiple educational and economic inequalities. Based on this report, Baumol says we do not need to create and increase the number of individuals with entrepreneurial traits, but rather need ensure that those already in possession of those traits apply them in legal ways. By offering our intervention program from a young age, participants are being offered a new way to beat the unemployment trap and create real wealth for themselves and their communities through micro-business.

Data from the 3 self-employment programs we have delivered to date certainly shows that there is some genuine, positive change happening amongst our target cohort.

Currently, pre and post–survey evaluations (weekly) along with one-on-one sessions post-program is the extent of how we capture evidence of positive program change.

Weekly evaluations on learning outcomes such as participant competency with public speaking, financial literacy, business understanding and other soft skills will also be conducted via printed evaluation forms. In addition, participants will be asked to provide feedback in the form of phrases or short sentences that best describes their experience. This allows us to report both quantitatively and qualitatively on the success of the workshops. Additionally, the feedback can be used to adapt and improve the way the sessions run in future to ensure the maximum satisfaction (and learning outcomes) of participants.

Other overarching KPIs that are tracked over the whole program including the intensive 5 to 20 weeks of training + 12 months of alumni support: 

- The number of program participants who gain employment or self-employment.

- The type of employment gained (permanent, part-time or casual). 

- For those who pursue self-employment, the number who continue working on their businesses beyond the program conclusion. 

- For those who pursue self-employment, the amount of revenue they generate. 

- Participants decreasing involvement with the youth justice system. 

- Participants attendance in mainstream schooling.

Creating Your Future Job is a self-employment program for young people aged 10 to 24 years. During the program, participants identify a local, community problem, brainstorm a micro-business solution and work towards making an income through self-employment.

Creating Your Future Job is an exciting program but exceptionally tough to scale.

Current scaling problems include:

• Staffing. The program is very staff-intense due to the nature of our target cohort. It requires lots of people during the intense weekly program delivery to ensure participants create strong habits during the program. The type of person that can deliver this program is super unique and requires huge amounts of training.
• Participant time. The participants could be in school learning core classroom skills during their time with us - many organisations and parents find it difficult to justify letting their child participate in our program instead of the standard education system content. 

Problems that we're super keen on working through include:

• Staff recruitment and training. How do you train staff in bulk and still get strong learning/ employment/ self-employment outcomes? Online training is easy and efficient but based on our experience, the online training outcomes are far lower than face-to-face intensive training. Furthermore, who is accountable for meeting learning/ employment/ self-employment outcomes? How do we create a sense of responsibility amongst our new staff as we grow into new regions to ensure strong program outcomes for the young people? 
• Entrepreneurship and self-employment carry many different learning outcomes. While we measure the amount of income/ revenue they product/ their post-program employment prospects, there are lots of other outcomes that we achieve. How do we actually measure these outcomes? For example, we simply ask participants at the start of a program to evaluate their understanding of financial literacy out of 100. We ask them the same question at the end and report on the difference. We know there are better ways of doing this. What are they? How do we actually properly measure this learning improvement?
• While 53.54% of participants are still self-employed/ employed at the conclusion of the Creating Your Future Job, there's a significant proportion of participants that drop-off as soon as the intense, weekly program is now over. They need the accountability but the program cannot last forever. How do we increase engagement post-program? What should our alumni engagement program actually look like? What is truly best practise?