Most Pittsburghers know and love WQED. Native preschoolers grew up watching everyone’s favorite neighbor, learning from Daniel Tiger and King Friday, and hopping aboard the trolley to the “Neighborhood of Make Believe”.
WQED was the nation’s first community-supported television station when it aired on April 1, 1954. It became home to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which transformed television for children and families and grew to air nationally on what would later become PBS.
Today, WQED continues to impact the community through its five television programming stations, three radio streams, Pittsburgh Concert Channel, and WQED Interactive, providing free content to residents in its viewing and listening areas and online. In 2019, WQED launched Future Jobs, a nationally recognized educational initiative. The project was created in response to Allegheny Conference’s research, which identified an ongoing “brain drain” and significant future workforce and diversity gaps, particularly in the financial services market.
The goal of Future Jobs is to educate and inspire. Through multiple vehicles, including TV programs, short videos shared online, community events, and educational programs, Future Jobs provides useful career-focused tools and information to thousands of people of all ages in the Pittsburgh region, including students, families, educators, and job-seekers.
In 2023, Future Jobs – Working Today has broadened its focus on the employment landscape but will continue its three-time Emmy Award-winning educational program in schools across the region, introducing junior and high school students to a variety of in-demand career fields.
A Gibson Capital—WQED Partnership
At Gibson Capital, LLC, we have a long history of giving back to our profession and a vested interest in being around to serve our clients for generations to come. So we are delighted to partner with WQED by serving as a sponsor of its Future Jobs initiative to raise awareness of the financial services profession in local schools and colleges and to reinvigorate existing workers through hiring fairs and training sessions.
Tune in to WQED and catch Gibson’s first-ever television ads that will air to more than 800,000 people across Southwestern Pennsylvania for seven weeks. The content sponsored through the Future Jobs initiative will also be shared with WQED’s network of seven additional PBS stations across the state, reaching over five million households.
Throughout its history, WQED has partnered with hundreds of local community organizations, focusing on education, arts and culture, community health, economics, and important local issues through its unique form of civic journalism. We are excited to be associated with such important work.
To learn more about Future Jobs – Working Today, visit wqed.org/futurejobs.
