What Motivates Employer Engagement? Promoting Youth Career Embeddedness in Two Tennessee Regions

Abstract

While workforce development can create skilled workers and better jobs, employer engagement is often limited. This article analyzes the case of Tennessee Pathways and draws on interviews with highly engaged employers, including those that hosted youth worker interns. The author investigates how employers accounted for their involvement and how program design shaped the benefits they perceived. Despite a traditional focus on skills gaps, the author finds that most employers sustained their engagement due to workforce challenges rooted in a mismatch between new hires’ expectations and the realities of the job, which resulted in high turnover of incumbent adult workers. Employers perceived that youth programs addressed this issue by fostering “career embeddedness” and deepening youth workers’ commitment to a nascent career interest or by redirecting them to other viable options. The author argues that practitioners should promote the potential of workforce development to yield long-term workforce reproduction and next-generation career development.