Hire-A-Youth Program Gives Summer Jobs to Teens

Thanks to Pacific Gateway, a public workforce agency, 500 Long Beach teenagers are now employed. Through their Hire-A-Youth Summer Internship and Employment program, teenagers in Long Beach will be able to work with small local businesses.

The program also provides teenagers with a National Work Readiness Credential as well as basic job skills like reading time-sheets, communicating efficiently in the workplace, and problem solving. Participants are paid and required to work 75 hours during the summer.

Teens are often hired by the businesses they worked for after completing the internship.

This program echoes the steep increase in the youth workforce found in the statistics collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which states that in the summer of 2012, "the youth labor force grew by 2.9 million, or 14.2 percent, to a total of 23.5 million in July."