EXPANDING CAREER OPTIONS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: - Evaluation of Boys & Girls Clubs of America’s CareerLaunch Program

The quantitative data were collected through online surveys (designed using SurveyMonkey) to the CareerLaunch teen participants and staff prior to and at the end of their CareerLaunch experience, and an online survey administered to Club leaders at the start of the evaluation. [...] Both Club staff and the teens themselves reported that CareerLaunch provided a healthy “reality check” in that it heightened the participants’ awareness of the working world and of what it took to get a job and be a good worker. [...] –CareerLaunch participant The factors that contributed to those changes the most were the mock interviews and the preparations for the mock interview, the skills assessment, and the goal-setting exercises. [...] BGCA was responsible for the selection of the Clubs to participate in the evaluation, which varied by the degree of experience implementing CareerLaunch: some had been using the program for several years, while others were using it for the first time. [...] The purpose of the surveys was to gather information about the staff: their background, their training on CareerLaunch, the teens they served, and the extent to which they felt prepared to run CareerLaunch prior to implementation.