Step 3. Expand Networks to Expand Opportunities: Helping Students Forge New Connections

Diversifying students’ connections can often mean recruiting new “outsiders.” But the first step to finding those new connections is understanding whom students already know but may not be viewing as valuable resources or connections to help them achieve their goals. For example, a student may view a neighbor as a friend of her parents, but might not know what that neighbor does for a living. In addition, by leveraging the “taking stock” strategies in Step 1, you can start to surface relationships in students’ networks whom other students in your program could benefit from getting to know, in turn encouraging students to share their network resources with one another.

A personal timeline is an activity that facilitates opportunities for students to picture, make sense of, and identify experiences and patterns in their lives. Creating a personal timeline can help students anchor their own identities to support their future career exploration and can help educators better understand their students’ experiences and interests. Kupu, a nonprofit in Hawai‘i dedicated to increasing high school students’ readiness for natural resources careers, was looking for a way to incorporate more two-way communication between students and program staff, as well as between students and outside professionals. Students’ personal timelines helped Kupu’s near-peer facilitators to dive deeper into students’ interests and goals. They then drew upon the goals to narrow in on students’ existing connections who might be able to help reach those goals, and asked students to create a map of those connections via a relationship-mapping activity. For a step-by-step guide to this activity, see Appendix B of our report “People-powered pathways.”

The notion of homophily, more commonly thought of as “Birds of a feather flock together,” describes the fact that people are more likely to trust others who they perceive to be similar to them. By asking students and new connections to share aspects of their lives and identify areas of common interest, experience, or taste (even if those are not obvious at first), you can increase the likelihood that trust is forged. Innovative programs like Climb Hire often use storytelling exercises for students to share their own stories and frame those stories to prospective employers. They also provide students with a list of possible questions that they can ask when conversing with prospective employers to purposefully surface homophily or shared experiences and interests.

Relationships may go badly for a whole host of reasons, but you can take steps to ensure a negative relationship does not cause lasting harm to students’ sense of self-worth and academic ability. Ensure that you have someone in place to help the student process what happened in that negative interaction or relationship. For example, mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters Massachusetts Bay have developed protocols for how staff can engage in practices that promote healthy “closure” of mentor-mentee relationships, including acknowledging emotions, reflecting on memories, and considering how the mentee grew or changed in the course of the relationship. MENTOR’s director of research and evaluation, Mike Garringer also offers helpful guidance on implementing positive “closure” practices.

If students are far along on their educational journey and have specific goals, high-touch, enduring mentor connections can increase the likelihood of getting hired. For example, Big Picture Learning’s approach to high-touch mentoring in the course of internship-based learning appears to be paying off in graduates’ job prospects. In a study of three of their high schools’ alumni outcomes, 88% of those who did not enroll in college secured full-time employment—with 74% reporting that this employment was facilitated through a mentor or contact from one of their internships.

If students are still exploring possibilities, then programs should think about ways to multiply the number of connections to people working across an array of industries. This expands students’ access to opportunities and their sense of possible future selves. Broad, diverse networks with high levels of structural diversity expand students’ optionality down the line. Opening up these connections can include everything from job shadows to career chats to short client projects. When doing so, come up with clear protocols by which students can “get back in touch” with people they meet, so that those weak ties remain accessible afterward.

Many career-exposure and experience programs rely heavily on staff to train and support students. But students and near peers can also train and support one another if there is a culture of social support established early on, and if there are protocols and infrastructure tools to promote information sharing.

Every time a “new” person comes into contact with your students, frame that exchange to both visitors and students as an opportunity for forging connections. Work to ensure that guest speakers hail from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences that reflect the student population you serve. Try to structure two-way conversations where students can share something about themselves. Encourage guest speakers to reflect with students on how relationships helped them accomplish their goals. Create secure avenues by which students can get back in touch by re-engaging guest speakers on future projects or lessons where their expertise is relevant. For example, CommunityShare helps educators in K–12 invite community members into classrooms, often creating enduring relationships between students and guests. For postsecondary institutions, tools like Riipen help faculty integrate working professionals into projects and coursework, in turn exposing students to real-world projects and connections.

Many programs are focused on expanding career opportunities through internships. Although internships are critical onramps to jobs, they are difficult to scale and don’t always yield strong networks. Explore shorter dosage opportunities for career exploration and experience, such as micro-internships, short client projects, and capstone projects as alternative routes to putting professional skills, feedback, and connections within reach for students. For example, Parker Dewey is an online marketplace offering brief, paid work experiences to college students.

Brokering new networks is a powerful way to expand opportunity, but part of the power of networks is making more people aware of students’ potential, passions, and skill sets. Consider how to ensure that students can show what they know when interacting with new connections, and consider capturing this information in your LMS or CRM tools as well.

Apprentice Learning, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that provides real-world work experiences for eighth graders, primed employers to begin developing deeper relationships with young people by sending weekly emails to employers that contained conversation starters such as “consider talking with your apprentice about your first job,” or “consider sharing about a time when you encountered a struggle in your job and how you navigated it.” Schools can also encourage employers to reflect on their relational skills and cultural competence with tools like Search Institute’s Relationship Check tool or MENTOR’s Connect Focus Grow Curriculum.

One way to help students gain networking practice in a real-world setting is to introduce friendly competition. For example, EmployIndy, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit organization offering apprenticeships for high schoolers, created a “social capital challenge” to incentivize students to build their social capital. Students received points toward a prize for getting coworkers’ email addresses, asking coworkers about how they obtained their role, and inviting coworkers to lunch.