In 2016, the Chief Evaluation Office partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to fund the Evaluation of Strategies Used in the H-1B TechHire and Strengthening Working Families Initiative (SWFI) Grant Programs. The evaluation includes three distinct components. (1) The implementation evaluation examined how grantees implemented the programs, challenges and successes, and best practices for future programs. (2) The outcomes evaluation is painting a rich descriptive picture of participants’ training program outcomes, such as training completion and credential receipt, and employment and earnings after the program. (3) The randomized controlled trial examines, for a subset of 5 grantees, the impacts on participation in and completion of training, receipt of credentials, use of services, employment and earnings, advancement and job quality, and other exploratory outcomes such as overall well-being, health, and housing status. 

The H-1B TechHire and SWFI grants were created to reduce employers’ need to hire temporary workers from outside the United States (U.S.) through the H-1B visa program. The grants aimed to achieve this by funding local organizations to offer accessible training and supports to unemployed and underemployed potential U.S. workers who had barriers to training, creating a pipeline of workers able to fill jobs in the high-tech fields such as information technology, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing that employ H-1B workers. The grants targeted partnerships consisting of workforce agencies, education and training providers, and business-related nonprofit organizations. ETA awarded $150 million to 39 TechHire grants serving several hard-to serve populations in 25 states; and $54 million to 14 SWFI grants in 13 states targeting parents with low incomes for whom childcare access was a barrier to investing in education and skills. Programs operated from July 2016 to June 2020. 

Some key takeaways include: 

• At 2 years after random assignment, more TechHire/SWFI participants had completed training than would have without the program. The program also had impacts on receipt of credentials and a variety of pre-employment services.  
• SWFI had impacts on receiving help finding childcare in a convenient location (12 percentage points more than the control group) and receiving help finding an alternative to regular childcare in an emergency (7 percentage points more than the control group). However, this offered support did not translate into increases in childcare use or a reduction in childcare barriers to training and employment.  
• The one subgroup for which the programs had an impact on employment was the long-term unemployed—those who had never worked and those who had been out of work for 7 or more months at study entry. Compared with the control group, more long-term unemployed participants (67 percent) reported being employed during at least one-quarter in Year 2, compared to the control group (51 percent).