Goodwill’s Career Quest uses YouTube to show young people what’s possible

When Goodwill was forced to close its Asheville Career Center because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it did what so many other organizations did at the time: It turned to Zoom.

“We started hosting classroom webinars,” says Jody Stevenson, job developer/skills training manager for Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina. “We would find some large employer in the community and invite them onto a Zoom meeting where the students and their teacher could log on. And we would interview that employer live in front of the kids, and then the kids could have a chance to ask questions.”

The program, called Career Quest, allowed Goodwill to serve one of its missions: teaming with local schools on a workforce development curriculum for students.

Eventually Zoom fatigue set in, and Goodwill stopped the webinars. But officials had accidentally discovered that using video was an effective way to introduce tech-savvy young people to a wide range of career paths they may not have known about in the Asheville area.

“We liked what we had stumbled into,” Stevenson says.

Goodwill kept Career Quest going by building a video studio at the Career Center and creating a YouTube channel in 2023.

Local employers were then brought into the studio and interviewed for short videos exploring how they got into their roles and what it is like to work in their fields.

“We ask them to tell us their story,” Stevenson says. “People really gravitate toward stories, young people especially. We try to tease some things out [in the interviews], but we also never know exactly what we’re going to get, which kind of adds to the YouTube/podcast culture that we have right now.”

The YouTube channel has posted 50 video interviews from employers at such organizations as the Verner Center for Early Learning, YMCA of Western North Carolina, the Asheville Hotel Group, Blue Ridge Power, the Grove Park Inn and GoPrime Mortgage. Most of the videos are 10 minutes or less.

Career Quest works with Asheville High School Career and Technical Education (CTE) students who are studying childhood education, business and hospitality. In the fall, they will work with Adobe Visual Design classes. The program also worked with a job exploration class at Buncombe County Early College and hopes to have more partnerships with Buncombe County Schools in the future. Additionally, Career Quest is doing a summer series of workplace tours with a Goodwill youth group.

After the videos

After students watch the videos, Goodwill officials and educators lead them in a discussion of the content and work with them to develop questions they can ask when they tour the businesses. Typically, classes tour two businesses per semester.

“The videos help us introduce these employers to them before seeing them in real life, but I think the real life tour is at the heart of this,” Stevenson says.

Stephanie Kelley, director of operations at the Verner Center for Early Learning, is one of the local employers who shared her story through Career Quest videos. Last school year, she led three Asheville High early childhood education classes on tours of the center, which serves children from birth to 5 years old.

“When the high school students meet me in person, they’ve already had that connection,” she says. “It’s funny because sometimes they’ll be like, ‘Oh, that’s the lady from the video!'”

Students typically ask Kelley basic questions about the job, such as how much she gets paid.

“They’re high schoolers, so their ideas and their questions are definitely different than they will be in 10 years when they’re working in education programs. But they have that spark for the work, and they want to know more about the job and what it looks like.”

One student who showed a spark during a fall tour of the Verner Center ended up interning for class credit during the spring semester. She is heading off to UNC Charlotte to study early childhood education. Kelley thinks two students who toured the center in the spring will be fall interns as well.

“If you’re just sitting in a classroom reading a textbook, you don’t have the emotional connection to the work,” she says. “Experiencing the highs and the lows with the teachers and the children is really important. I tell high schoolers all the time, ‘We don’t ever want you to do this work if it’s not something you really want to do because it’s not worth it. We’re not in it for the millions of dollars that we make every year.'”

Kelley is excited about connecting with students because, she says, the pandemic exacerbated an ongoing decline in the number of people who are interested in becoming teachers, especially for early education.

“One of the biggest things that we have to do is help to build up the workforce with the kids who are going through high school and want to be involved,” she says. 

Making connections

Darrell Clark, a career development coordinator with Asheville City Schools (ACS) CTE program, says the videos and tours do a good job of exposing students to job opportunities in Asheville.

“A lot of these kids don’t know about a lot of this stuff beforehand,” he says. “We try to talk about it in the school system, but when Goodwill comes and shows them the different factories and employers we have in the community, the kids are really interested. It’s big-time eye-opening for the students.”

The students have a variety of questions when they meet with employers: What skills are required for the job? How much education is needed? And, of course, how much will they get paid?

“Kids always talk about the type of money they want to make, the type of money they know they need to make to live in Asheville,” Clark explains. “Or they talk about the type of work their family does, so maybe they want to go into that field until they see different things that Asheville has to offer.”

Ivry Cheeks, director of career and technical education for ACS, says getting in front of local employers is particularly important for students who do not have connections or experience in the business world.

“One of the things we do with CTE is to show our kids how they can do the research to be able to find these opportunities,” she explains. “Sometimes our kids may not have that kind of support, so being able to do this partnership with CareerQuest on top of what we do with CTE helps fill those gaps.”

In addition to for-credit internships like the ones offered by Verner Center for Early Learning, Goodwill funds paid summer internships for high school students who participate in its OneLife program.

“I think it’s great to be able to get the knowledge and get the skills [through an internship], and if we can help the students earn money too, that’s the cherry on top,” Cheeks says.

Getting work experience and going through Career Quest is beneficial for students who are planning to enter the workforce right after graduation and for those who go to college, she says. “If you’re sitting with the admission counselor, and they’re trying to decide between two students, this program is something that’s going to help you stand out.”

Cheeks praises Goodwill for teaming with local companies that are willing to give students opportunities. Some Career Quest participants have landed full-time jobs at companies they first encounter through the program, she says.

Stevenson says the focus on letting students hear directly from local employers through the videos and the tours is crucial to making Career Quest work.

“There are some other platforms out there that focus on job exploration and what have you, but they use  stock footage. Our thing is that we want to talk to local employers here in Asheville and make them our hometown heroes. It kind of brings the magic of the big screen to the classroom.”