While many point to schools, parents and public leaders as the people responsible for educating youth and preparing them for jobs and careers, a growing number of business leaders are talking about creating pipelines to careers. Yet few have strategies that engage all of their resources, or that provide continuous long-term investment in this process.

Here are strategies we recommend leaders follow:

Make a personal top-level commitment to support youth development.

Appoint a senior manager from marketing or strategic planning as the CEO's personal representative.

Establish a research and planning team to review and prioritize involvement opportunities and answer such questions as 

    What are the needs? 
    What are we doing now? 
    What are we doing within a o­ne-mile radius of our facilities? 
    What is the competition doing?.


Begin a communications and advocacy program . Use company newsletter, bulletin board, web site, product packaging, blogs, etc. to show where the need is greatest and to point employees to programs which already exist.

Provide recognition for those who become involved, such as breakfast with the CEO.

Provide a forum , such as the Tutor/Mentor Connection portal, for volunteers within the company and in other cities to network and share their experiences. This encourages others to become involved. It also builds volunteers for your strategic planning team.

Encourage year-to-year growth and improvement of volunteer efforts and involvement. CEO continues to make this a priority by having a personal review of results and of next year's goals.

Begin to develop a funding stream to support the organizations o­n-going commitments. Add volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs to the organization's annual payroll deduction fund raising appeal.  Designate a share of profits from new items to a tutor/mentor fund.

Share your achievements o­n your web site, and link to the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC). Encourage others in your industry to learn from you, so that more companies share the responsibility for building a mentoring-to-career support system.

Document your actions . Visit the Tutor/Mentor Exchange web site and use the Organizational History and Tracking System to document actions you and your company take to achieve this vision. http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/TMC_OHATS_page.htm