This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief summarizes evidence from the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse about interventions that provide occupational and sectoral training. The strategies are useful for helping people with low incomes improve employment and earnings outcomes. Occupational and sectoral training is defined as training designed to prepare clients for professional opportunities within a specific occupation, such as truck driving or welding, or a specific sector, such as health care or manufacturing. Occupational and sectoral training is often provided in fields that are growing or in high demand. In addition to providing classroom or practical instruction in occupational or sectoral skills, these interventions often match clients with a case manager and a job developer.

Hundreds of local labor markets fuel the American economy, and each one is driven by the needs of the local area’s mix of industries and the skills of its workers. When these needs and skills align, everyone can benefit. But many local economies are struggling to achieve strong alignment between the demand for middle-skills credentials (certificates and associate’s degrees) and the supply of these credentials produced by local institutions. This Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce resource consists of a full report and a data tool, both of which demonstrate that in half of the nation’s labor markets, at least 50 percent of all middle-skills credentials would need to be granted in different fields of study to meet projected labor demand through 2031. The report focuses on the great misalignment between middle-skills education and training, and middle-skills jobs—and what stakeholders can do to address it.

Led by Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago, Career Launch Chicago is an initiative working to develop youth apprenticeship programs that offer young people throughout the city opportunities to build in-demand skills and prepare for quality jobs in multiple high-growth industries, including advanced manufacturing, health care, and information technology. It also hopes to expand early college courses that are relevant to those pathways in target high schools and develop a work-based learning continuum that extends into earlier grades. Jobs for the Future published this profile which offers an in-depth look at the model Career Launch Chicago is developing, with examples of structures and approaches that other intermediaries and apprenticeship providers could apply to their own programs. It also offers recommendations of ways to scale youth apprenticeship by better integrating education and workforce systems.

As technology advances rapidly, the labor market exhibits a growing need for workers who receive ongoing skill development. Employers in many fields struggle to find adequately trained workers to meet their needs. Community college noncredit career and technical education (CTE) programs are an important contributor to skill and workforce development and help to close this skills gap. This MDRC brief summarizes early findings from a study of FastForward, which uses a pay-for-performance model to fund noncredit CTE programs at the 23 colleges in the Virginia Community College System. The brief also presents findings on the different approaches used by colleges and programs to deliver training, student and staff experiences in these CTE programs, and students’ academic and labor market outcomes.

Nonprofit organizations that offer youth development and young adult talent development services have increasingly centered the voices of the young people who are participating in their programs. They have accomplished this by infusing youth-centered practices into their programming and, more formally, creating leadership opportunities such as youth councils and alumni associations. This Jobs for the Future brief draws from interviews with program leaders and the young people they have hired to highlight how and why organizations have brought young people into paid staff positions, what the experience has been like for them, and the meaning they are making of their experience. This brief highlights four organizations in the Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) initiative. LEAP is a national initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation that aims to help youth and young adults ages 14–25 who have been involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems, parenting youth or youth who have experienced homelessness succeed in school and at work by building and expanding education and employment pathways.

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 (WIOA) improves services for people to find and keep jobs, and requires vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies to use some of the money they receive from the federal government (about $1 of every $7) for pre-employment transition services (pre-ETS) for students with disabilities. Youth with disabilities, including those who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), might need support for finding and training for jobs beyond what school traditionally offers. Students with disabilities often do not have as many opportunities for career development and training, could have trouble finding work because of their disability, and might come from lower-income families.

This Mathematica brief summarizes findings from a study examining how transition-age youth with disabilities receiving SSI may have been affected by WIOA and their access to pre-ETS.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief explores Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), a large-scale program in Kentucky combining residential clinical treatment for substance use disorders (SUDs) with employment services. ARC operates in several locations across the state, but is located primarily in rural, Appalachian areas hard-hit by the opioid crisis. This SUD residential treatment and recovery service is combined with employment services including job readiness training, internships, and online courses leading to a range of short-term occupational certifications. Employment services are provided in the later phases of the residential program when participants are relatively stabilized in terms of their SUD recovery. This brief offers recommendations for those implementing similar programs or that are interested in developing them.

Registered apprenticeship programs are industry-vetted and approved by either the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship (OA) or a federally recognized State Apprenticeship Agency (SAA) to ensure they meet criteria to maintain quality. This Urban Institute brief explores differences in the states’ apprenticeship approval timelines, number of programs registered, and how the occupations of registered programs vary by registration agency. Additionally, it explores differences between OA states and two types of SAA states: those in which the state agency has sole approval authority and those in which apprenticeship councils can approve programs.

On May 31, 2024, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) announced a proposed rule to give state child support programs the flexibility to use federal funding to provide employment and training services for eligible noncustodial parents. Providing employment and training services to unemployed and underemployed parents who have child support obligations has proven to benefit children and their parents. These types of programs result in increased employment rates and earnings as well as the amount, number, and regularity of child support payments. This ACF press announcement explains how the proposed rule would allow state child support programs to use federal funding for services such as skills assessments, occupational training, and job placement. The deadline to submit comments via Regulations.gov is July 30, 2024.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report presents the plan for evaluating the impacts of the Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education project and the first round of Health Profession Opportunity Grants on key outcomes nine years after random assignment into the program.

The purpose of this resource is to document the study approach and publicly commit to specified outcomes in hypothesis testing and an estimation approach prior to inspecting treatment-control differences on newly collected data. It describes the operationalization of outcome measures, including their source data. It refers to prior documents for data, measures, and methods previously established for the evaluation.