CEO Library

The report presents findings on American Apprenticeship Initiative (AAI) grantee program operations from fall 2017 (approximately two years into the grant when data were first available) through summer 2021, when most grantees had concluded their grant activities and others were close to finishing. The report documents the degree to which grantees collectively met their apprenticeship program registration targets, their apprentice registration targets, and their pre-apprentice program implementation and enrollment targets. It also describes variation on these among grantees.

In 2019, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration, Office of Unemployment Insurance (OUI) to conduct the Behavioral Interventions to Improve Work Search Among Unemployment Insurance Claimants project. The unemployment insurance (UI) program requires claimants to be actively looking for work while they receive benefits to encourage a rapid return to work.

In 2016, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) and funded contractor Abt Associates to conduct the Evaluation of the Cascades Job Corps College and Career Academy (CCCA) Pilot. The program evaluation aims to document the implementation and assess the impact of the CCCA pilot program.

The brief describes the challenges associated with helping low-income parents with children under the age of 13 pursuing training and employment to access affordable child care. It also proposes solutions that programs may undertake to increase their effectiveness in assisting parents with accessing and paying for appropriate child care. Further, it identifies barriers that remain to be addressed at the systems level.

The brief is based on lessons from an evaluation: a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a small subset of the 53 TechHire and Strengthening Working Families Initiative (SWFI) programs—three TechHire programs and two SWFI programs—that explored the implementation and short-term impacts of TechHire and SWFI. In particular, this brief focuses on findings from the implementation analysis that was part of the RCT; data sources for the implementation analysis included observations of TechHire and SWFI programs, interviews with staff members, and a review of program participation data.

The report of impact evaluations aimed to assess the effectiveness of behaviorally-informed communications – such as a pop-up alert and emails – in increasing unemployment insurance (UI) claimants’ compliance with work search requirements.

The report from a Job Corps pilot focused on enrolling students in college to prepare for a career in healthcare or information technology, conducted February 2017 through June 2019 with 488 students from the Pacific Northwest (ages 16-21) with at least a sixth-grade level of competency in reading and math) enrolled in Job Corps’ Cascades College and Career Academy (CCCA).

The report from a Job Corps pilot focused on enrolling students in college to prepare for a career in healthcare or information technology (IT), conducted February 2017 through June 2019 with 488 students from the Pacific Northwest (ages 16-21) with at least a sixth-grade level of competency in reading and math) enrolled in Job Corps’ Cascades College and Career Academy (CCCA). This report describes the pilot vision and the pilot contract, summarizes the findings of the evaluation, and considers some discussion.

Technical appendix to the Evaluation of the Cascades Job Corps College and Career Academy (CCCA) Final Report: Appendix A: Theoretical Roots of the Cascades Job Corps Model, Appendix B: Cascades Pilot Evaluation Data Sources, Appendix C: Survey Methods for the 18-Month Follow-Up Survey, Appendix D: Additional Technical Information on Methodology, Appendix E: Definitions of Outcomes, Appendix F: Definitions of Baseline Measures, Appendix G.

The brief describes how Job Corps and community colleges serve young people, how Job Corps currently works with colleges, and how partnerships between Job Corps and colleges could benefit students, Job Corps, and the colleges. The brief also describes the evaluation’s methods and shares what the Job Corps centers identified as the core principles and practices undergirding their successful college partnerships. These core principles and practices include shared goals, clear roles and responsibilities, constant communication, and accommodating each organization’s different requirements.

States participating in the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) program use evaluation evidence to continually improve their RESEA programs. The list is an array of resources that states can draw on to support their efforts to grow their capacity, to use existing evaluation evidence, and to develop new evidence. This list is organized by resource type. Some resources are narrowly targeted to a single topic while others cover a multitude of topics.

The report features findings from an evaluation of EMPOWER that used quantitative pre-post and descriptive analyses to measure changes in the outcomes for adolescent girls and women and qualitative analysis to contextualize findings. The evaluation’s primary objectives were to determine whether EMPOWER increased participants’ skill levels and, in turn, increased adolescent girls’ access to acceptable work and adolescent girls’ and women’s involvement in self-employment and paid work.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) H-2A guest worker program plays a critical role in supporting agricultural employment and production in the United States. Under Executive Order 13985, President Joe Biden has provided an opportunity for federal agencies to assess equity challenges under their purview. In this report, the researchers investigate equity issues related to legal oversight of the H-2A program.

The paper presents how the researcher conducted a study to examine the association between labor market changes and disability among working-age Americans at the county-level. The researcher theorized that deindustrialization—or the decline of industrial capacity due to social and economic change—created a polarized workforce in which economic and social circumstances are driving up rates of disability among marginalized American workers affected by these changing conditions.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides eligible employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. Existing evidence has documented that FMLA is associated with higher leave-taking and improved maternal and child health.

In the paper, using data from before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, the researchers show that the expansion of benefits under the CARES Act only modestly increased self-reported unemployment insurance (UI) recipiency among UI eligible workers, from 27% in 2018 to 36% in 2020/2021. They find that the same demographic groups that historically are less likely to report receiving benefits (less educated, younger, and racial and ethnic minorities) continued to be less likely to receive benefits during the pandemic.

The report presents American Apprenticeship Initiative (AAI) implementation study findings. The primary data source is interviews conducted during in-person site visits to 10 AAI grantees in spring 2019 and follow-up telephone calls with grant staff in fall 2020. The report documents the design and operation of grant activities and identifies potentially promising practices, implementation challenges, and lessons for future initiatives.

The paper documents key patterns of community-level disparities in access to unemployment insurance (UI) during the pandemic. To operationalize the notion of access to UI, researchers rely on a comprehensive conceptual framework that allows them to track a jobless worker’s access to UI benefits across three discrete stages in the lifecycle of a potential UI claim. To document the degrees of disparities in access throughout the lifecycle of a UI claim, the analysis develops and compares measures for each stage of access both across states and at more local levels within California.

In 2021, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to fund contractor Manhattan Strategy Group to conduct the Navigators in Social Service Delivery Settings: A Review of the Literature with Relevance to Workforce Development Programs under the Evaluation Technical Support portfolio of studies.

In 2020, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) funded contractors Mathematica and the University of Connecticut Health Center to conduct a study of factors associated with opioid use among U.S. workers.

The first report from this study, Factors Contributing to Variation in Nonmedical Use of Prescription Pain Relievers Among U.S. Workers: 2004-2014, analyzed secondary data to understand how nonmedical use of prescription pain relievers varied across states, industries and occupations, and other worker characteristics.

The report of the Career Pathways Descriptive and Analytical Project focuses on “mid-level” occupations—occupations that typically require education or experience beyond a high school diploma or equivalent, but less than a four-year college degree. The report presents study findings on the magnitude of the differences between occupations in the career outcomes that entrants go on to experience within 10 years after entering, which occupations are associated with high wage growth, and what traits of occupations predict higher wage growth.

The report summarizes 46 impact evaluations that focus on programs that embed elements of the career pathways approach. In the past decade, the career pathways approach to workforce development emerged as a promising strategy to promote long-term earnings advancement and self-sufficiency by helping workers attain in-demand postsecondary credentials (Fein, 2012). The approach involves a combination of rigorous and high-quality education, training, and other services to support participant success (WIOA, 2014).

The brief summarizes the input on research priorities gathered from stakeholders and experts by the WIOA Research Portfolio project team between November 2020 and April 2021. The timing of these discussions provides important context for the findings. Many discussions were held during a surge in cases of COVID-19, when social distancing measures were widespread. Other discussions were held after the vaccines were becoming widely available and restrictions were being lifted. The conversations also spanned two different presidential administrations.

The report provides the findings of the implementation of a quasi-experimental design to understand how changing labor market conditions associated with the pandemic affect opioid use.

The brief summarizes findings of the Career Pathways Descriptive and Analytical Project’s meta-analysis study, which analyzes research on the impacts of 46 career pathways programs, based on evaluation findings published between 2008 and 2021. The brief first describes the programs and participants in the evaluations included in the meta-analysis. It then discusses the study’s overall impact findings and the findings about which program characteristics were associated with impacts, as well as the implications of each for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.