Description:

Building Employment Skills for Positive Youth Development (PYJD) is a comprehensive program for developing workplace social skills. The PYJD Program models cooperative career internship training and designed to teach at-risk youth soft skills and job skills needed to attain employment aligned with their career and job interest. The purpose of the program is to "raise the educational competence of at-risk youth through basic skills development, to encourage good citizenship, and to offer career and technical education that will lead to increased chances of future employability." Workplace skills to be developed involve verbal and non-verbal communication, social awareness, problem solving, working cooperatively, good citizenship, and compliance. This cooperative economics self-sufficiency training emphasizes the value of career goals, personal growth and power to obtain inner values that lead to self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-motivation, and self-empowerment. This program will integrate positive youth development through prevention program activities, intervention and youth correction strategies, academic achievement, identity development, social skills training, career and employment planning, youth leadership, and mentoring, coaching, and teaching. At-risk youths will learn to achieve personal growth by applying 4-principles (Participation, Ownership, Emotional, and Autonomy) adding a new principle Behavioral Modification.