Employment Coaching Programs Short-Term Impacts Briefs

Research suggests that the stresses and uncertainty of poverty can be overwhelming, leaving less mental bandwidth for effective development and use of self-regulation skills, including those that are critical in finding and maintaining employment. It also suggests that coaching can promote self-regulation skills and hence may be a way to help adults with low incomes become economically secure. For this reason, some Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other employment programs that serve adults with low incomes have been implementing employment coaching. These four impact briefs by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation present estimates of impacts of coaching on participants’ self-regulation skills, employment, earnings, self-sufficiency, and other measures of personal and family well-being at 9 or 12 months after study enrollment.