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Keys To Success
Close and supportive supervision is the cornerstone of WOS, according to Wayne Howie, a WOS employee and manager of helpdesk services at Thirteen. Howie works closely with his staff to ensure they are developing their technical skills and personal interactions with the employees they support. "There's a constant back and forth with feedback," says Howie, who explains that he eases WOS workers into their roles and monitors them closely. "The idea is that they are set up to succeed."
For example, when Alex Caamaño joined Thirteen's helpdesk staff two years ago, he was just 18 and had had little exposure to a corporate setting.
During high school he had been transferred twice to different schools because of disciplinary problems and for fighting with other students. "I had a little bit of an anger issue when I was younger," Caamaño says.
But, it was clear that Caamaño was bright. And at his last school—Independence High School in Manhattan - was where Langer found him and seven other students in the last weeks of their senior year.
All entered the WOS program, but Caamaño says he was the only one to complete the program.
Still, entering the corporate world was a big transition. Caamaño suddenly found himself interacting with strangers in a business setting. "Alex never had that much exposure [to the corporate world]," Howie says, and was not used to talking to people outside his circle of family and friends. But Caamaño adapted. "The me of a year-and-a-half ago is a completely different person than now," he says. "I'm a lot more mature and have a better understanding of how the world works."
Today Caamaño's technical and interpersonal skills have him running the help desk when Howie is on vacation. Caamaño plans to enroll in college in the fall and, if he completes his degree, he'll be the first in his family to do so.
For CIO Devine, WOS's contribution goes well beyond help-desk support and toward tackling one of his most difficult challenges: recruiting minorities and women into the technical workforce. "We don't have to worry about that anymore," says Devine, whose staff now has gender, racial and ethnic diversity.
Thirteen continues to renew its annual outsourcing contract with WOS and Devine says that the helpdesk team has always met performance goals. Thirteen's business unit doesn't challenge the arrangement because everyone is happy with it, he says. "The relationship is now normalized as it would be with any vendor.
How WOS Got Started
While WOS officially took off in 2005, the genesis of the program goes back about eight years, according to Langer, who had participated in programs that provided corporate internships to those in New York's poorest communities. But, Langer says, the early programs he was involved with failed to address critical issues, like the fact that poor young people are under tremendous pressure to immediately earn a living, making it almost impossible for them to hold low-paying or no-paying internships. "The question was how to take people from inner-cities and transition them to the workplace for the long-term," says Langer, who found that neither corporations nor academic institutions on their own could build and sustain viable work programs for inner-city youth.
So Langer founded the non-profit WOS as an "incubator" that would help students get technical certification from marquee universities and create additional curriculum and mentor support to supplement the professional and developmental gaps facing young people. With this approach, Langer says it's possible to level the playing field between those with and without economic and social advantages.
Prior to starting the technical certification program , the students attend a six-week professional skill-building course that helps Langer and his colleagues determine a young person's likelihood of success in the corporate world. Attendance and completing homework assignments is critical during the pre-certification, as is the ability to read and write effectively. "If you take a reasonably intelligent person who is very poor and doesn't have the same chances as their better-off peers, success is very hard because of all the external challenges they face."
To offset the culture shock that may occur when placing new workers-few WOS employees have been exposed to the customs and insider language of the corporate setting-most WOS staffers start on the job as paid interns three days a week following the successful completion of the first semester. The less rigorous schedule exposes them to the business environment and practical experience, yet allows time to focus on the academic training, Langer says. "If they don't finish their education, what are we to do with them? The focus is to excel in their lives and to continue to develop and succeed."
Langer has also developed a mechanism to evaluate a student's development and determine their readiness to enter the workforce. The Workforce Maturity Arc is an evaluative tool designed to assess individual development in six areas of workplace literacy, including cognition, technology, business culture and self-esteem. During the certification program, WOS participants are required to meet with mentors and write regularly in journals. Those journal entries are a primary source for evaluating a worker's ability to balance work and personal life, Langer says, a critical professional skill.
Once on the job, WOS workers have abundant onsite support from qualified managers that are generally employed by WOS (Wayne Howie in Thirteen's case), as well as offsite mentors like Langer, who keep up with program participants and are intimately aware of their progress.
Next: Financial And Organizational Gains
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