Pathways to Employment

Youth unemployment is a significant global issue exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected young workers. This demographic is twice as likely to be unemployed as older adults, and this early unemployment can lead to long-term consequences, such as fewer career opportunities, lower wages, and reduced prospects for better jobs. With the shift towards a gig economy, the rise of AI, and an increase in remote positions, traditional pathways to employment are changing rapidly. Connections and networks often play a vital role in securing first jobs, but many young people lack access to the relationships and guidance critical to bridge the gap between graduation and a first career job. 

In our conversations with corporate partners, many struggle to fill open positions in high demand fields such as cybersecurity, customer service, community management, and computer programmers. They want to diversify their hiring streams but need to ensure career readiness of aspiring candidates. 

Young graduates want to work but lack the connections, training, and codes to land good jobs. Companies want to hire diverse candidates but don't have the access or the resources to engage nontraditional candidate profiles. 

Global Mentorship Initiative (GMI) bridges the gap between graduation and first career jobs for underrepresented young professionals from diverse communities. Through leveraging digital resources, mentorship, AI, and human connection, we are building a more equitable workforce of tomorrow's leaders. GMI's flagship program, the GMI Mentorship Program, is a structured, 12-week, virtual, one-to-one mentorship with a career professional. In four years, GMI has scaled from supporting 20 students through this program to over 6,000 in 100 countries, including 8 refugee camps. 

GMI believes that the best way to build equity is providing targeted support to young professionals as they determine their own career path, and that human connection is fundamental to building a more equitable and empathetic world. Our program provides access to professional pathways that may not have been otherwise accessible to our students. We also focus on the professional codes that are commonly accepted by those who excel within these career paths. Now that we have scaled an effective, impactful program that gets young graduates career ready, we would like to get them hired. With MIT's support, we would like to dedicate specific resources into building out an Employment Connections Platform, which would primarily entail working with corporate partners to create personalizable onboarding mentorship modules that would connect GMI graduates directly to jobs.

After completing the GMI 12-week job readiness/soft skills mentorship, students would have the option of doing an additional training module, delivered similarly to our current program via a one-to-one mentorship, focused on transitioning directly into open positions in high demand fields (cybersecurity, customer support, community management, computer programming, etc.). We will work with corporate partners to build out at least 4 of these modules, make them available to students, and measure employment as well as satisfaction by the students, the mentors, and the hiring companies.

GMI is currently piloting a enhanced mentorship with Microsoft's African Development Center to support 70 young women in STEM as they connect with entry-level IT positions in Kenya. By directly linking learning to employment and offering practical support that recognizes the challenges faced by youth, especially in fragile economies, GMI's approach is likely to have a lasting impact. The broadening of GMI's program to encompass more languages and regions also suggests a scalability that can meet the ambitious goals.

GMI consists of a lean operational team and relies on technology, including automated mailings, AI-powered training resources, and a web-based mentorship resource portal. These onboarding modules will continue to be delivered with these resources, pairing one-to-one human connection with a scalable digital platform. 

GMI currently supports 6,000 students in 100 countries, including 8 refugee camps. Our learners are in the final 2 years of a skills-based or degree-seeking program. They are all members of historically underrepresented or marginalized communities, as defined by our local youth partners operating on the ground in all of the countries where we support young people. 74% of graduates of the GMI Mentorship Program are employed within 6 months of graduating. Through collaborating with GMI's corporate partners to develop industry and role-specific onboarding modules, we are hoping to support our graduates in having increased access to good career jobs in their field of choice. As the program evolves, we are hoping to provide additional resources for students looking to enter fields from which they have been historically excluded, such as young women in STEM and graduates from the Global South in climate action roles. 

GMI is dedicated to providing the resources, insight, and connections for all of our students, regardless of the situation they were born into, to have increased agency in defining their professional and personal journeys. 

In the 4 years that GMI has operated, we have proven our ability to create a strong curriculum, scale it globally in underresourced communities, and foster human connections through leveraging digital resources.

Our Founder and CEO, Jon Browning, has 10+ years in curriculum development and consulting, as well as significant experience in impact hiring and recruitment in distressed communities. Jon co-authored the Impact Sourcing Guidancelines and co-founded the Global Impact Sourcing Coalition. After a career at Microsoft, Jon joined the Rockefeller Foundation where he supported the Digital Jobs in Africa Initiative.

GMI's partnership model is that we connect with local actors who are supporting young graduates. If they feel our program would be a good fit, they nominate students to go through our program, and we work closely to provide reporting as learners complete our program and enter their first career jobs. 

Our program is fully funded by corporate partners who believe in our mission and are prepared to support through mobilizing their employees as mentors, sponsoring students, and providing employment opportunities. Our partners come from diverse industries, including technology and cybersecurity, BPO, telecommunications, healthcare, recruitment, etc. With MIT's support in deploying this pilot, we will be able to make the business case for supporting GMI as a hiring resource, ensuring funding as we develop additional modules and resources. 

GMI is currently in the process of deploying the first reinforced mentorship module in partnership with Microsoft's African Development Center. We will connect 70 young women in STEM in Kenya with 70 female computer engineers currently employed at Microsoft for a 12-week GMI soft skills and career readiness mentorship, followed by a 12-week technical skills mentorship. Upon successful completion of the mentorships, students will have the opportunity to apply for open positions within Microsoft and their candidacy will receive special attention during the recruitment process. 

In additional conversations with current or prospective partners, there is interest in developing additional tracks to support students in cybersecurity, customer service, etc. GMI is ready to support these requests with MIT's support. 

Sustainable solutions require partnership and invested stakeholders. Left to our own devices, with only funding, we could work with a 2-3 key corporate partners to design a few onboarding modules and test them with these same partners. The scope would be limited, and the implementation time would be longer. Through entering MIT's Solve community, our hope is that we will be able to connect with key companies within high demand industries who are committed in implementing innovative strategies to get young people hired globally. We would partner with 2-3 companies for each module to ensure that the content is both specific and transversal and meets their recruitment and onboarding needs. These companies would also help us mobilize mentors to test multiple mentorship processes - should students and mentors be matched based in shared academic or professional background? For both parts of the mentorship or only the technical piece? Is it more impactful to have multiple mentors with different perspectives or one engaged champion? 

Through partnering with MIT and the Solve community, our hope is to cultivate a multi-stakeholder collaborative pathway which not only meets immediate needs of the graduate and the market, it can serve as a replicable model to connect graduates with careers and a more equitable workforce globally.