Freshmen and sophomores from Notre Dame High School in Lawrence are pictured during a visit to Silver Bridge Financial in downtown Boston on Feb. 4 as part of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund’s Industry Tour Program.

The Industry Tours program provides hundreds of inner-city students from Catholic schools in the Greater Boston area with an up-close and personal look into a wide variety of professions and career paths and gets them thinking early on about their futures.

With the past few years creating an overall gloomy picture of the working landscape and some of these realities hitting many students close to home, it is more important than ever to continue to instill in youth the importance of education as a pathway to professional success, organizers said.

“On the way back the kids were talking about how much they liked it and how much they got out of it,” said Jon Krol, one of the teachers who accompanied the students.

The volunteers at Silver Bridge were Michelle Knight, director of fixed income; Keith Elflein, director of equity strategies; JP Powers, research analyst; Dune Thorne, senior relationship manager; Serena Li, director of marketing; Andrea Saum, senior client associate; and Jennifer Loveless, client associate.