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Many youths are out-of-school with few having the basic sustainable skills to earn a living. Some of the engaged ones have interpersonal relationship and other problems that can sustain the successes of their business. Therefore, this study is set to investigate the relationship between affective behaviour, emotional intelligence and success of out-of-school youths in cell phone maintenance enterprise.

Purposive sampling technique was used to select the sample. Of the total, 350 out-of-school youths who are engaged in cell phone maintenance enterprise in computer village Ikeja, Lagos State, Nigeria, were used as a sample, but 292 samples with completely filled research instrument were used for the study. Data collected were validated through the principal component analysis and the hypothesis tested through the confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS and SPSS.

The result of the study showed that affective behaviour and social skills do not necessarily predict but self-motivation predicts the career success of out-of-school youths in cell phone maintenance enterprise. Self-awareness, emotional regulation, social awareness and emotional receptivity significantly influence affective behaviour towards success in their chosen career.

This study enhances the cell phone maintenance association or group to adopt the participation of on-the-job training of their members to help them build good relationship and self-esteem. The training will improve their emotional intelligence and further enhance the creation of a formidable emotional intelligent workplace team.

The study affirms that the constructs of emotional intelligence are predictors of career success among out-of-school cell phone maintenance. It boosts their moral and psychological behaviours towards building good customer relationship which culminates into success in their career area. This study also motivates the out-of-school youths that success is multifaceted that involves building adequate personal and social relationship within the circle of their co-maintenance personnel and customers.

This study showed that success in any chosen career involves adequate training, inter- and intra-personal relationship and building adequate emotional intelligence to overcome the varying challenges that may be encountered. Also it indicated that personal development in a chosen career is essential and career successes can be built around personal goal orientation rather than building it in circle of people around. The study does not totally neglect social relationship because no man can live and succeed in isolation.

This study presents an innovative approach to Information and communication technology (ICT) skill training and employment generation for out-of-school and disadvantaged youths in Africa. With technical and policy assistance from the World Bank, ICTs can be used to revitalize technical and vocational training to meet skill and employment needs of disadvantaged youths in the region. The deplorable conditions of out-of-school youth and the state of secondary education in Africa underscore the urgency to engage disadvantaged youth in productive economic activities. An ICT-enhanced technical and vocational training program in Africa provides both private and social gains: it provides economic prospects for disadvantaged youth and; it adds to the development of the knowledge economy in Africa. The NairoBits Digital Design School in Kenya is presented as a model of a vocational and training school that uses ICTs to improve skill formation among disadvantaged youths in informal settlements in urban Africa. Meeting the objectives of an ICT-based training and employment generation program for underprivileged youth in Africa require strong regulatory frameworks and contributions from the World Bank. The involvement of the bank, particularly through private sector grants for ICT skill train in Africa will help to revitalize technical and vocational education and training in the region. Above all, the collaboration of government agencies, private businesses, other international development agencies and civil society groups in ICT skill training will help to meaningfully engage African youths in the development of their communities in the emerging knowledge economy.

Using a regression discontinuity design in tandem with a difference-in-discontinuities analysis, the study finds that increasing the minimum wage reduces the employment probability of young males by 2.5–3.1 percentage points.

The authors exploit an age-specific minimum wage rule – which sets a lower minimum wage for workers of age 15 than the adult minimum wage paid to workers of age 16 and above – and its abolition to estimate the causal effect of a minimum wage increase on youth employment and education in Turkey.

The authors also document that, initially, the minimum wage increase does not lead to a major change in high school enrollment, while the likelihood of transitioning into “neither in employment nor in education and training” (NEET) category notably increases. However, in the medium term, the NEET effect is transitory; school enrollment increases over time and absorbs the negative employment effect.

The authors argue that policy effects have mostly been driven by demand-side forces rather than the supply side.

Drawing from ethnographic work among Haitian street youth and domestic workers, this chapter explores potential new directions for the ethnographic study of youth in difficult circumstances. In particular, it suggests that hope is a key theme in youth’s lives and that it ought to be explored ethnographically through a lens focusing on cultural practices: that is, on the ways youth actively construct their futures through engagement and agency across time and space. Focusing on the situated cultural practices of youth helps to move the discourse beyond constructs of risk and resilience toward understanding the ways in which youth use actively construct their futures through mobility, personhood, and collective identity.

Connected learning is a framework of learning principles that centers on fostering educational equity through leveraging social technologies and networking practices to connect students with opportunities, people and resources in communities within and beyond their classroom walls (Ito et al., 2013). The framework has been adopted and developed in K-12 education by teachers in professional development networks and introduced to some teacher education programs through these networks. Practitioners of connected learning frequently refer to the need for “courage” to develop and introduce connected learning-based practices in their classrooms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this study, the authors investigate “courage” through a sociocultural lens in the case studies of six educators in a teacher education course on connected learning. The study examines the social contexts and activities that fostered acts of courage during their 14-week course.

The authors found that personal reflection on freedom and equity, two ethical concepts raised by the connected learning framework, seeded acts of courage. The acts of courage appeared as small acts that built upon themselves toward a larger goal that related to the participants’ ethical ideals. Three types of social activity contexts helped to nurture these acts: seeking models of possibility, mediated reinvention and “wobbling.”

This study helps to uncover some of the questions that connected learning scholars and practitioners have about why courage is so central, and how to cultivate courageous acts of pedagogical change.

The theoretical framework used in this study, courage from a sociocultural perspective, may serve to help scholars and teacher educators to shape their research and program designs.

This study offers insights into patterns of networked teacher-led educational change and the social contexts that support school-level impacts of out-of-school professional networking.

Using a sociocultural conception of courage to investigate connected learning in teacher education, this study demonstrates how equity and freedom, central values in the connected learning framework, serve as key concepts driving teachers’ risk-taking, innovation and change.

Current literature on youth development supports the theory that out-of-school programming has an effect on youth development. However, little research has been conducted on types of out-of-school programs and comparisons among involvement in various activities in relation to developmental assets. Hence, the purpose of this study was to analyze relationships between students’ participation in out-of-school programs and the development of positive assets. Specifically, this study explored how 4-H participants differ from other students in their attainment of specific assets.

Findings support past research that indicate out-of-school programming is making an impact on the development of youth. Strong differences specific to 4-H participation were not found. Instead, findings indicate that asset development is not the result of one program; rather, it is important to provide a variety of options that ensure a good “fit” for the young person.

This study aims to explore how youth poets wrote in a community of practice and how their out-of-school poetry writing contributed toward developing disciplinary literacy.

In this qualitative case study, the authors studied youth’s writing by drafting narrative field notes, collecting student writing and process drawings and interviewing participants.

The authors found that the poets in this study maintained ownership of their writing and engaged in writing processes in ways that reflected Behizadeh’s (2019) conception of authenticity as writing that connects both to students’ experiences, and to the purposes and audiences of their writing context.

This out-of-school context provides implications for how English Language Arts teachers can rethink what disciplinary literacy looks like in classroom writing instruction.

By maintaining ownership of their writing, the youth agentively positioned themselves not only as students accumulating disciplinary knowledge but also as participants in a community of practice.

Operating in both traditional schools and alternative learning systems (ALS) requires organizations to have a strong understanding of what drives the cultural acceptance of violence and the capacity of the local populace to find peaceful solutions. This paper explores the results from a formative social network analysis (SNA) study on out-of-school youth (OSY) in the Philippines for educational programming in crisis settings. SNA views relationships in terms of nodes and ties – nodes are the individual actors in networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. As part of a process evaluation, SNA can shed light into the “black box” of how and why people and groups interact.

Study data came from a survey of 1,006 youth between the ages of 18–24, in a cluster-randomized sample from eight municipalities in Mindanao, Philippines. The survey captured information on demographics, acceptance of violence, resilience and the relationships between youth/voluntary organizations, as well as between youth/trusted contacts (“alters”). These data were transformed into findings using both descriptive techniques and regression analysis.

This paper finds that among Mindanao youth, the patterns connecting OSY with organizations, trusted contacts, acceptance of violence and resilience are extremely complex. The evidence paints a picture of OSY who are disconnected with institutional support, largely confined to their barangays (villages/neighborhoods) and surrounded by people who have overlapping roles as neighbors, relatives and friends. The analysis fails to outline a single, unified picture and instead reveals a tapestry of disparate points. More abstractly, SNA as a methodology captures a unique slice of the complexity of youths’ lives and how aspects of this complexity evince the need for more effort to be put into adapting OSY programming to local conditions. The results also support previous research highlighting how push and pull factors combine in uniquely individual ways that defy general demographic patterns. Demographic variables, for example, explain little of the variation in youths’ perceptions of violence and resilience, despite the strong significance of gender, age and urban/rural residence in most models. Variables for ethnicity and religion, in contrast, generally did not significantly influence acceptance of violence or perceived resilience.

From the constellation of findings, this study posits the following conclusions: regarding future development projects, practitioners can use SNA to better understand the complex patterns of influence on OSY at the community level. There is still ample opportunity to broaden and deepen institutional engagement with Mindanao’s OSY population. Programs hoping to involve OSY should expect to dedicate special time, attention and resources to their recruitment, education and training. Regarding the design of interventions, programs focusing on mitigating or addressing violence/violent extremism should acknowledge the complexity of social networks. Education programs should thus be explicit about specific desired outcomes, elaborating how they intend to mitigate which types of violence and under what circumstances for which subgroups of youth.

Regarding future research and evaluation, the study demonstrates how SNA, as an innovative monitoring and evaluation method, can map and measure human and organizational relationships, both visually and mathematically. The suite of methods under the SNA umbrella deserve greater attention and use by those seeking to learn about what works in providing quality educational services in crisis settings.

This article makes a case for the importance of brokering future learning opportunities to youth as a programmatic goal for informal learning organizations. Such brokering entails engaging in practices that connect youth to events, programs, internships, individuals and institutions related to their interests to support them beyond the window of a specific program or event. Brokering is especially critical for youth who are new to an area of interest: it helps them develop both a baseline understanding of the information landscape and a social network that will respond to their needs as they pursue various goals. The paper aims to describe three critical levers for brokering well in informal settings: creating learning environments that allow trust to form between youth and educators and enable educators to develop an understanding of a young person’s interests, needs and goals; attending to a young person’s tendency (or not) to reach out to educators after a program is over to solicit assistance; and enabling potential brokers to efficiently locate appropriate future learning opportunities for each young person who approaches them. The authors also include a set of program practices for providers who wish to increase their brokering impact, as well as recommendations geared primarily toward organization leaders. The authors hope that this paper brings clarity and enhanced significance to the practice of brokering as a strategy to support youth pathways toward meaningful futures.

Insights presented here are the result of a participatory knowledge building and sharing process with a community of after-school providers known as the Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network. The topic of discussion was how these providers might continue to support young people in their intensive project-based programs after the program was over. The authors of this article, acting as embedded research partners to Hive NYC, contributed insights to these discussions based on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies of high-school-age youth in the Hive NYC context.

The authors articulate a set of brokering practices and a conceptual model that communicates how brokering might lead to valued long-term outcomes for youth, including increased social capital.

The intent is that information and perspectives from this article will inform youth-serving practice and serve as a catalyst for further conversations and activities geared toward promoting youth pathways of learning and identity development.