Looking at the statistics of youth that held jobs, we realized that developing responsibility and real world skills at a young age will have a direct positive effect on the San Mateo Community! The current program has zero investment mobile technology for youth and we are here to bridge that gap.
Employment can be beneficial for youth by teaching responsibility, organization, and time management and helping to establish good work habits, experience, and financial stability. There are many advantages to working during high school, especially for low-income youth, including higher employment rates and wages in later teen years and lower probabilities of dropping out of high school. Knowing how to find and keep a job is not only critical for admission to the adult world but also is an important survival skill for which there is little in the way of formal, structured preparation.
Our app has the potential to reach more than 27,000 young people in San Mateo County. In the 2014-2015 school year,there were 27,757 high school students. This number doesn’t include youth under 21 who have graduated from high school.
We’ve created an app to help all youth in San Mateo County--including Foster Children-- find jobs, internships, and volunteer opportunities. The app will also help them acquire critical job and life skills. This aligns with the goals of San Mateo County. Our app utilizes the existing Jobs for Youth program offered by SMC. We reached out to the Jobs for Youth office in Daly City and spoke to Ruby and Rosa about their pain points and wishlist items. They’ve wanted a mobile app for a while but never had the budget for one.
We experienced a few Github issues and merge conflicts. No dataset for job postings currently exists. All of SMC's Jobs for Youth information is on handouts.
Today we created a WORKING, ROBUST, ANDROID APP that can eventually be downloaded from the Google Play Store onto ANY ANDROID DEVICE.
Through our research we learned a ton about all the services and programs offered by SMC. We have been inspired to use our technical skills to help the county serve its residents.
