The Skills-Transfer Gap in Youth Development and What Training Requires of Organizations

Recently, I was on a coaching call with the executive director of a youth-serving organization. She had just come from an end-of-cycle celebration at one of her after-school sites, the kind of event where young people present their work and families fill the room to celebrate them. The performances went well, but the rest of the event was chaos. Young people were running everywhere, the staff had no control of the space, and parents were complaining. She and a colleague who had come to observe ended up stepping in to help manage the event.

Her first read was the one our field reaches for. The group leaders need better training. They're young, they're part-time, and we haven't invested enough in their skills.

I asked her a question. Do you run this same program anywhere else?

She did, at a second site. That site, she told me, was night and day. The program ran well, the young people were engaged, and the staff felt supported. I asked her to tell me about it. The group leaders at the two sites had nearly identical profiles. Same age range, 17 to 22. Same communities. Same training, delivered by the same organization. At one site they were struggling, and at the other they were thriving, running quality programming every day. Whatever was going wrong, it did not start with the group leaders themselves. The strongest evidence was a few miles away.

As she described the strong site, she began answering her own question. What made it work was the coordinator, who had good relationships with the school, managed well, and supported the group leaders on the ground. The coordinator at the struggling site had never been given that kind of footing, and no one above was helping them find it. By the end of the call, she had moved her own diagnosis. Yes, the group leaders needed better development, she said, but what mattered more was the person standing with them every day, and whether that person was being supported too.

The struggling group leader is usually a signal. When a program room falls apart, we look at the adult standing in it, because that adult is the easiest person to see and the easiest to send back to a workshop. The more useful question is not whose fault the chaos is, but where the responsibility for changing it lives. Often, the answer sits a level or two upstream.

Two Different Problems

There are two distinct problems in how our field develops its people, and we keep treating them as one. The first is access. For part-time youth workers, access to professional learning remains uneven, particularly beyond what their own organizations provide. That problem is real. So are gaps in what the training covers. A review of the field's professional development literature by Richmond, Braughton, and Borden has found that few youth-worker training programs prepare staff to engage the cultural assets, beliefs, and values of the young people and families they serve. The second problem, skills transfer, gets much less attention. Even well-trained staff cannot practice what they have learned when the shape of their job leaves no room for it.

Training is only the beginning of learning. You learn something, and then you practice it. Someone who knows the work watches you and gives you feedback. You reflect on what happened, on your own and with your peers. All of that lives in supervision. The weekly one-on-one, the team meeting, the manager who observes you on the floor and talks with you about it afterward. Take those away and the training still has value. It only goes so far.

Now consider the conditions we ask these staff to carry. The part-time group leaders most programs run on are often working their first job. Their hours are program hours. In many organizations, there is not one paid minute that sits outside direct service, because that is all the contracts funding their positions will cover. 

Emerging adulthood describes the period between adolescence and settled adulthood, the years when people work out who they are before adult roles and responsibilities settle. These roles leave no room for that. At 19, a group leader is the steady adult in the program room, responsible for someone else’s development while still forming their own.

When a group leader is dysregulated, they have little chance of steadying a young person who is also dysregulated. Regulation is not simply a trait someone has or lacks. The capacity to remain steady develops in relationships, through repeated experiences of co-regulation, reflection, and repair. Group leaders therefore need someone who can help them process difficult moments and practice the steadiness they are asked to offer young people. In many programs, the site coordinator is that someone.

Leaders often default to training because it is what the system makes visible and fundable, and because it is difficult to imagine, let alone ask for, conditions you have never experienced. In AIR’s Power of Us workforce survey, three out of four respondents started their careers in the youth fields at 25 or younger, and that held for the ones who now run organizations. Many of today’s leaders may therefore be drawing on their own early experiences of the field when they decide what staff development should look like.

The field has started saying this out loud. The National AfterSchool Association's Out-of-School Time Job Quality Standards, released in 2024, treat professional growth and job design, including supervision and development time, as dimensions of quality in their own right.  The National Academies' 2025 report, The Future of Youth Development, reaches similar conclusions. Better-trained practitioners keep landing in jobs that cannot hold them, and every departure threatens the central conditions associated with positive youth development, which are consistent relationships with adults over time.

What It Looks Like When the Conditions Exist

I came to this understanding because my first professional youth development job happened to hand me the conditions, and early on I assumed they were normal. I was 28, running a peer education program as a community health educator in western Washington, and I walked into an environment with real resources allocated to the education team, leadership rooted in the work, regular supervision, and ongoing professional development. The expectation was that I would continue cultivating my skills, and the organization provided the support and structure to translate those skills into practice. Only later did I learn how rare that was.

What I experienced was more than good management. It was a set of organizational conditions that allowed training to become practice:

• Dedicated time for supervision and coaching
• Opportunities for lesson planning and reflection
• Professional development connected to day-to-day work
• Leadership with expertise in youth development
• Resources that prioritized staff learning, not just program delivery
• Peers to think alongside, and a regular habit of feedback

Without those conditions, staff cannot perform at the level of their training. They practice at the level their working conditions allow. 

Recently, I observed one of our nonprofit partners create those conditions. The organization runs programs through a large roster of part-time staff whose paid hours had, for years, been almost entirely direct service. Staff arrived, taught, and left. Professional development happened only sporadically throughout the year, disconnected from the work itself. Leadership recognized that this structure produced inconsistent experiences across program sites and restructured the role. Weekly schedules expanded from fifteen hours to seventeen and a half, with two and a half hours off the program floor. The formal training did not change. What changed was that the learning finally had somewhere to go each week.

Those additional hours created space for lesson planning, peer collaboration, coaching conversations, and reflective supervision; the everyday practices that determine whether staff improve and whether young people experience the outcomes the program promises. The organization paid for those hours with unrestricted dollars it raised itself, because the government contracts funding the program only covered direct services. 

That detail is where funders come in.

What Funders Are Funding

My colleague Lauren McCort, Youth INC's executive director, has written about why capacity building fails to stick when organizations train individuals without changing the organization around them. The same logic runs through funding. When a grant covers ratios, program hours, materials, and food, but nothing for supervision or the development of the people delivering the program, it treats quality as an expected outcome without funding all the conditions required to produce it. Under those circumstances, quality becomes more difficult to consistently build and sustain. The program is not the soccer game, the dance rehearsal, or the art project. The people are the program. Any funder who cares about youth outcomes is already depending on the development of the people who deliver them, whether or not the budget reflects it.

Reflecting it is not complicated. Grants can pay for non-program hours, so that a part-time week includes time to sit down with a supervisor. They can fund the supervisory layer itself, since the skill and capacity of coordinators and managers determine whether frontline training takes hold. And cost-per-child can be set at the true cost of quality, which requires us to count the people delivering the program. 

What leaders do control is the shift the executive director made on our call, and it is available to anyone willing to look. What you see in your program rooms reflects what has been built, or left unbuilt, above them. When something is off on the ground, the most useful place to look is upstream, at the point where support enters the system. In my own years running programs, the hardest and most freeing thing I learned was that the buck stopped with me, not with the newest staff member in the room.

Our field keeps asking whether staff have the right skills. Leaders and funders would get further by asking whether the conditions exist for those skills to take hold.  No single measure answers that question. Good people leave good programs for wages the field cannot match, for school schedules, for careers that part-time contracts cannot hold. But over the years, the pattern is hard to miss. Where the conditions exist, staff stay longer, and young people keep coming back, bringing their friends. Young people vote with their feet, and over time, so do the adults who work with them. In a field built on relationships, that is a pattern worth watching.

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