By Megan Sayles,
AFRO Business reporter,
msayles@afro.com
JPMorgan Chase announced a $5.3 million investment to expand career opportunities for high school students in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia on Nov. 30. The funds will be used to support TalentReady, an initiative of the Greater Washington Partnership (GWP) and Education Strategy Group (ESG) that prepares young people for in-demand careers and postsecondary opportunities.
This investment marks the second phase of the initiative, which was created in 2018. The first focused on information technology careers. Now, the program will expand to include additional pathways, like healthcare, determined by local labor market data.
“We have to act as a region to ensure that we’ve created the right pathways for young people to take advantage of the opportunities in not only the jobs of the future but the jobs that exist today,” said Nadine Duplessy Kearns, JPMorgan Chase’s vice president and program officer for global philanthropy in Greater Washington. “We have a responsibility to ensure that all stakeholders, whether they be school systems, employers, the corporate sector or the nonprofit community, are singularly-minded and focused on creating opportunities for young people to step into the jobs that will help our communities thrive.”
JPMorgan Chase’s investment will support students in Baltimore; Fairfax County, Va.; Montgomery County, Md.; Prince George’s County, Md.; and Washington, D.C.
Through TalentReady, ESG and GWP will collaborate with the secondary and higher education school systems in those districts, as well as regional employers, to provide greater access to postsecondary opportunities, high-value credentials and professional experiences.
“A high school diploma will not be enough in Baltimore City and in the D.C. region to obtain jobs that pay well enough to support a family. We’re aiming toward a continued pathway where you obtain a credential beyond a high school diploma,” said Matt Gandal, president and CEO of ESG. “In many cases in this initiative, we’ll be helping support more advanced and college-level courses in industry-recognized credentials that can be earned while the students are still in high school.”
GWP is using the funds to support the Employer Signaling System (ESS), which bridges the gap between the classroom and the workplace. Employers are able to report on the latest knowledge, skills, abilities and credentials needed for in-demand careers, while educators leverage the insights to inform their curriculum.
“Through our TalentReady work, we’re continuing to strengthen the ESS, our innovative process and tool that combines labor market data with feedback from employers and educators to paint a comprehensive picture of the region’s workforce landscape,” said Kathy Hollinger, CEO at GWP. “We know conversations about talent pipelines can occur in silos, with various stakeholder groups in discussions amongst themselves, but not always to one another. The ESS serves as the connector between these groups — educators, employers, and more — allowing them all to speak in common language about talent needs and skills gaps.”
During the first phase of TalentReady, Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) worked to increase the number of students entering computer science and cyber networking career technical education (CTE) pathways. According to Gandal, ESG discovered that students from certain ZIP codes did not have access to these programs.
“It turned out that in certain geographies in Baltimore City, there were only some students who were getting access to programs that led to credentials that opened the door to well-paying jobs,” said Gandal. “If you moved to a different part of the city, you found those schools did not have any of those programs. All the students were being ushered into pathways that I would argue led to dead ends.”
Robin Perry, CTE instructor for CISCO Cybersecurity at Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, said TalentReady has enabled her school to partner with organizations that specialize in exposing underserved students to careers in cybersecurity.
She thinks this investment is particularly important because it focuses on jobs that are readily available in the region.
“Skilled workers are needed in every industry but especially in cybersecurity. This generation was raised on technology,” Perry. “The ability for students to enhance a skill they already have, teaching them theory and practical applications within and outside of the classroom using real and virtual environments to review, expose and solve real-world problems, prepares them for greater things—things that can change their entire family. That’s the kind of program our school should support.”
Megan Sayles is a Report For America corps member.
