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When I ask Kalani Leifer if it’s possible to generalize how Gen Z employees think and act, he makes a cautious observation.
“What I have found—and I think this resonates with our program model—is a desire to step up and take on leadership roles earlier in their career,” says the founder and CEO of COOP Careers.
Leifer—a millennial and former high-school history teacher—should know. At COOP, he and his team help first-generation college grads land their first good job. “Our tagline is ‘overcoming underemployment,’” Leifer tells me from California. “The way we do that is through peers and near-peers.”
Since launching COOP in New York in 2014, Leifer has tapped into younger generations’ desire to lead. Program participants, who are the first in their families to graduate from college and/or attended on a Pell Grant, get divided into cohorts of 16. Each group is led by four near-peer “cohort captains”—young professionals in tech, media, or finance who are also COOP alumni.
“Oftentimes in their day job, they’re in quite a junior position,” Leifer says. “I think one reason so many of our alumni come back to serve as cohort captains is it gives them a chance, very, very early in their career, to step up and be a leader.”
Having run its program more than 500 times, COOP has no shortage of alumni. There are now about 7,000 in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco.
