Filling the Skills Gap: Matching Jobs with the Jobless Through Innovative Internships

Last Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a story about an innovative jobs program, “Year Up.”  Year Up is an intensive year long job training program that matches poor urban youth with Fortune 500 companies, teaching them the specific skills necessary for the thousands of jobs that remain unfilled.  

Here is how the story began:

It may surprise you to learn that even in this time of stubbornly high unemployment there are hundreds of thousands of good jobs available that companies are finding hard to fill.

But one Wall Street veteran believes he’s found an overlooked source of talent that could be the answer. 

He started something called Year Up — a year-long jobs training boot camp for some of the country’s most disadvantaged young people. And so far thousands of graduates are now working at companies like J.P. Morgan, American Express and Facebook. The result is that many of the country’s most powerful CEOs are finding that they can do well by also doing good.