It’s not every day that teens get a chance to experience for themselves what it’s like running a company. But that is exactly what JA high school students across the nation are getting the opportunity to do through a new program called JA Titan.

In this exciting game-based simulation, teens run a mobile phone company while learning about business strategy and management. They must make decisions regarding price, production, marketing, capital investment, and research and development. As each fiscal quarter progresses, students compete individually or in teams against each other to rank the best performance in net income, retained earnings, and market share.

“The Titan program was awesome,” says Highlands Ranch High School learning specialist David Garrett. “On the first day of the program, the students were asking a whole bunch of questions. But then they started to work together, figure it out, and all had successful businesses.”

The overall development of the new JA Titan program was made possible thanks to the financial support of Janus Henderson. Denver’s Head of Diversity and Community Relations, Demesha Hill, helped facilitate this support as well as support to implement the new program locally for JA Rocky Mountain partner schools.

“We believe that investing in students today will lead to better outcomes in the future,” Hill says. “Our partnership with JA enables us to impact students globally by providing them the business skills they need to be successful in the future.”

Hill also volunteers with JA. This year, she recorded a video giving students a real-world perspective on how companies research and develop products and how production decisions are made, adding rich context to the JA Titan simulation.

“We are committed to helping youth achieve their full potential through access to better educational opportunities and we believe this partnership helps contribute to our mission,” Hill adds. In metro Denver, 700 students have already participated in JA Titan during the 2020-21 school year, and some even competed in the JA Titan Challenge this spring, which gave teens the opportunity to demonstrate what they learned about making good business decisions.