Career Acceleration
Finding A new Path Forward
Lynchburg Beacon of Hope’s Career Acceleration Program aims to accelerate the training, mentorship, career development, and placement of talented opportunity youth and prime-age workers in the region. This partnership among Lynchburg Beacon of Hope, Promise Pathways, the GO Virginia Region 2 Council, the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance, Central Virginia Community College, and regional employers will launch in summer 2023.
This program is an effort to re-engage underserved, underemployed, undereducated, and underrepresented individuals in finding and preparing for upwardly mobile careers. This project enables Beacon of Hope to partner with the Town of Altavista, broadening our scope of impact and provide more data to create a demonstration project that can be modeled regionally and nationally.
Our Goal
Beacon of Hope’s goals for this initiative are succinct:
Increase the career capacity of the region by retaining young workers graduating high school
Reconnect with “pausers” that have some training and college education but no degree or credential and place them into the best paying jobs available in the region
Engage with two generation households, where parent and children are prime age workers, and connect them to living wage jobs
Create a long term career case management system that allows workers to continuously learn and prepare for new job opportunities
We are ideally suited for the objectives of the GO Virginia Council, the regional economic development community, and our local certification/credential providers because we already serve as one of the primary linkages between K-12 education, post-secondary education, and local industries in the Lynchburg area. Additionally, we have been engaged in addressing the talent gap, interest gap, affordability gap, and coordination gap in Lynchburg for the last ten years.
Our Program
This program combines senior-level counseling alongside employer-informed real-time employment forecasting data, individualized education sequencing, and life skills coaching to help workers connect to needed training and address job outlook through customized skills gap analysis.
To ensure successful job, diploma, certificate, and certificate placements, Beacon of Hope has fostered relationships with numerous employers and workforce partners that fall within the targeted growth industries, and it will utilize these relationships, as well as consistent partnerships with the local colleges, non-profits, and state organizations to form the core of a support system that will guide individuals to better-paying and more sustainable careers and ultimately upward mobility.
Our Impact
Our success working with students has garnered national recognition and the attention of the national organizations College Promise and Promise Pathways, who approached Beacon of Hope last year to serve as a pilot site for a career pathways model.
From 2023 to 2025, LBoH’s Career Acceleration Project will impact more than 800 individuals, a quarter of whom will benefit from credentialing and workforce programs in high demand career clusters identified by the GO Virginia Region 2 Council.
