Nonprofit, marketing firm launch Career Pathways program in Naperville
One of his best employees used to be a dog groomer. Another originally was a pizza delivery driver. His own path to becoming the CEO of a digital automotive marketing company involved several years working on a car assembly line.
Now Joe Chura of DealerInspire is helping Naperville-area students find their way into a job, potentially in his line of work, through a new program of the nonprofit organization KidsMatter.
Career Pathways intends to connect juniors and seniors in Naperville Unit District 203 and Indian Prairie Unit District 204 to the steps they can take to get from high school to a career.
The program this summer, in "beta" form, will connect roughly 30 students with an internship in one of five departments at DealerInspire, followed by a scholarship for later educational use.
But in future years, KidsMatter intends to expand the program to involve other businesses that will offer different career experiences, from short, introductory boot camps to work programs during the school year leading to real jobs after graduation, CEO Kamala Martinez said.
The program began Tuesday as roughly 60 students toured DealerInspire's office, filled out questionnaires and heard Chura's origin story of how he went from a jobless teen to a CEO who sold his companies in 2018 to Cars.com in what he said was the "third-largest tech acquisition in Chicago" that year.
Chura told students that when he found out at age 19 that he was soon to be a father, he knew he needed one thing: a job with benefits. He lived about a mile from a Ford assembly plant in Chicago and was able to get a job there on the assembly line piecing together things like the seat belts of the 1998 Ford Taurus.
He said he hated the work at first and felt like "a human robot," so when he learned Ford would pay some of the cost toward education, he began to pursue a bachelor's degree in business at St. Xavier University.
Chura said he'd read his textbooks one sentence or one paragraph at a time between cars on the assembly line. And when he completed his degree, he worked his way into a business and marketing position with Ford. From there, he began to learn more about the online marketing angle of the business, then ran a car dealership for a few years, then started his first company, Launch Digital Marketing, in 2011.
"You have to talk about yourself. You have to promote yourself," Chura said. "It's up to you to get out there and get after it."
KidsMatter aims to help students know the steps to "get after" the careers they want, since a stable job can come through much different paths now than it could a decade ago, Martinez said. For one example, she said, some students with coding skills are getting lucrative jobs straight out of high school based on their tech savvy alone.
The first year of the Career Pathways program will introduce students to working in either accounting, development and content development, customer service, performance management or analytics at DealerInspire. Roughly 60 students will attend a lunch-and-learn session in March before an anticipated 30 of them will be matched in May with internships to complete from June 15 to July 28.
"We just want to promote them to a pathway that they're passionate about," Martinez said.
As Career Pathways grows, educators anticipate it will involve more businesses and options for students who aren't interested in four-year college degrees.
"Our goal is really to have a wide spectrum of opportunities," said Jill Hlavacek, director of innovation and learning.