CEO Library

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.

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 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 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 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 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 report focuses on implementation of key changes to financial and management requirements for the American Job Center (AJC) system in order to seamlessly deliver services to all workforce customers across various partners. Data for this report are drawn primarily from site visit interviews, conducted in early 2019, with administrators, board chairs and members, employer and agency partners, and frontline staff in 14 states and 28 local areas. Other sources of information include administrative data and relevant state and local documents.

The report focuses on implementation of key changes to governance of the workforce system and how state and local workforce boards engage in planning across the core programs. Discussed here are the successes and challenges, promising practices, and possible areas for further technical assistance related to WIOA for workforce system governance and planning.

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 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.

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 datasets compiled for the Career Trajectories and Occupational Transitions (CTOT) Study can be used to inform career pathways and other employment and training programs by (1) identifying launchpad occupations associated with higher than average wage growth, (2) identifying occupational and worker characteristics associated with wage growth, and (3) identifying specific occupational steps associated with wage growth.

The paper presents a new analysis examining gender and racial/ethnic differences in wage growth among workers in the United States who, between the ages of 18 and 34, entered occupations that require some training or experience beyond a high school degree, but do not necessarily require a college degree (referred to as “mid-level” occupations). The paper includes implications for policymakers and practitioners.

The brief summarizes lessons learned from using machine learning to study the implementation of career pathways programs. First, this brief describes the research questions that guided the study and summarizes the machine learning methods designed for the data collection and analysis activities, including study limitations and challenges encountered. It then provides lessons learned on using machine learning methods for social science research.

Graphic highlighting several Career Pathway program milestones and improvements from the 1980's through the 2020's.

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.

In 2021, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) funded contractor Westat Insight and their partner American Institutes for Research to conduct the Explorations in Data Innovations project under the Administrative Data Research and Analysis portfolio of studies. This use case study was designed to explore options around employing machine learning to create and maintain a public-facing, labor-related data catalog.

The report describes the National Health Emergency (NHE) Demonstration Grants to Address the Opioid Crisis: Implementation Evaluation findings and considers lessons learned and practices that appear potentially promising for future efforts to provide workforce services and system investments to support people directly and indirectly affected by the opioid crisis.

The report focuses on the implementation and short-term impacts of TechHire and Strengthening Working Families Initiative (SWFI) — capturing between 7 and 14 months of follow-up—in the five programs that participated in a randomized control trial. The implementation analysis explored broad research questions about how the programs were implemented and what factors facilitated or inhibited implementation.

The report of an evaluation of strategies used in the TechHire and Strengthening Working Families Initiative (SWFI) grant programs. The evaluation includes implementation, outcomes, and impact studies. The impact study involves a randomized controlled trial of services provided by five grantees to estimate the effects of their programs on outcomes such as skill attainment, employment, and earnings. The focus of this report is the implementation study, which examines how 49 TechHire and SWFI grantees implemented their programs and the perceived effectiveness of the strategies used.

The report describes the characteristics of TechHire and Strengthening Working Families Initiative (SWFI) grant programs participants, participation in services, training enrollment, training completion, credential receipt, and employment. It also examines how outcomes vary by participant characteristics. The data come from the Participant Individual Record Layout (PIRL).

The brief draws on data collected from virtual site visits with 18 of the 23 America’s Promise Job Driven Training (America’s Promise) grant programs as part of a comprehensive implementation study to explore the development of and services provided by regional grant partnerships involving workforce development agencies, institutions of higher education, economic development agencies, employers, and community based organizations.

The literature review examined studies related to cash transfers and training voucher programs, through a search of the literature using the bibliographic databases/search engines Google Scholar, JSTOR, and ProQuest Social Science Premium and searched for terms expressing the concepts of interest: cash transfers and training vouchers, as well as specific training voucher programs identified in the search. The resources database of the National Bureau of Economic Research was also searched for additional relevant works.

The report is the first of three to present findings from the American Apprenticeship Initiative (AAI) Evaluation implementation study. This initial report primarily uses data from an online survey completed by all grantees, which documented the planning and implementation of grant-supported programs, including characteristics of grantees and their partners, strategies to engage employers, registering apprenticeship programs, identifying and recruiting apprentices, and the major components of apprenticeship programs, including related technical instruction and on-the-job learning.