This report summarizes the design and implementation of MyGoals for Employment Success (MyGoals), an experimental employment coaching demonstration program, launched in early 2017. The program aims to help recipients of housing assistance in Baltimore and Houston who are unemployed or working less than 20 hours a month set and achieve employment and related goals. Coaches follow a systematic process that focuses explicitly on self-regulation skills—the skills needed to finish tasks, stay organized, and control emotions. Financial incentives are offered for attending coaching sessions and achieving employment outcomes. MyGoals is one of four coaching interventions included in the Evaluation of Employment Coaching for TANF and Related Populations project.

The U.S. Department of Labor has issued the YouthBuild Funding Opportunity Announcement, which will award grants on a competitive basis to organizations providing pre-apprenticeship services that support education, occupational skills training, and employment services to opportunity youth, ages 16 to 24. YouthBuild supports youth who left high school prior to graduation that also have other risk factors, including being an adjudicated youth, youth aging out of foster care, youth with disabilities, migrant farmworker youth, youth experiencing housing instability, and other disadvantaged youth populations. The YouthBuild program model prepares participants for quality jobs in a variety of careers, including infrastructure, and contains wraparound services such as mentoring, trauma-informed care, personal counseling, and employment – all key strategies for addressing community violence.

Applications are due by February 7, 2023, no later than 11:59 p.m. ET.

The Works Wonders^® curriculum aims to connect young people in foster care with careers that interest them. Under the Works Wonders model, staff members customize learning plans and recruit local companies to employ older youth with foster care experience. Typical programming includes coursework, mentoring, job shadowing, paid internships, and career guidance. This blogpost examines the adaptation and expansion of the Work Wonders model at Monroe Harding (a Nashville-based nonprofit) in Tennessee and Foster Success (a start­up business training program) in Indiana to better serve their local youth.

The U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration invites workforce communities to nominate themselves to be a part of the Youth Systems Building Academy (YSBA). YSBA will provide local workforce systems and their community partners with targeted and individualized training and technical assistance to explore, design, test, implement, or scale system-level approaches to engage and support young people in the workforce including:

• Improving youth employment opportunities and outcomes.
• Increasing understanding of equitable policies and practices for youth career pathways and what a quality job means for young workers.
• Aligning local systems policies, resources, and programming, including among DOL-funded programs and investments and across other Federal, state, local and philanthropic funded investments.
• Using data to inform system improvements, including promoting a better understanding of how to use and share data to ensure equitable access and outcomes for youth served.
• Increasing knowledge and access to resources related to youth workforce professional development and building youth practitioners’ skills related to positive youth development and trauma-informed principles.
• Increasing awareness of the public workforce system for youth and young adults by engaging youth and including youth voice in messaging, recruitment, and engagement and other programmatic decision making.

Applications are due before Friday, January 13, 2023, 5:00 p.m. ET.

This four-part series is designed to help workforce development practitioners understand the neuroscience behind trauma and resilience and receive actionable steps to mitigate and manage toxic stress and trauma to cultivate a culture of resiliency for staff and organizations. The four guides are entitled: The Brain Science of Trauma & Resilience; Trauma in Workforce Development; Responding to Trauma Triggering in Real Time; and Cultivating a Culture of Resiliency in Organizations.

Youth involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems — sometimes referred to as crossover, dually-involved, dually-adjudicated, or dual-system youth — require a special focus. An intentional approach is needed because involvement in both systems is associated with higher risks for mental health, educational, and vocational challenges, higher rates of recidivism, longer stays in detention, and poorer placement stability and permanency outcomes. This blogpost illustrates the Crossover Youth Practice Model (CYPM) to address the needs of this population. It outlines the three phases of implementing the CYPM by identifying policies, programs, and practices that will enhance how a community supports crossover youth. More than 120 counties in 23 states have implemented or are in the process of implementing the CYPM as of 2022; the blogpost references reports on lessons learned in using this approach in Harris County, Texas, eastern Idaho, and Los Angeles County, California.

This report provides a new annual snapshot of the direct care workforce, including its demographics, occupational roles, job quality challenges, and projected job openings. It also provides detailed overviews of three segments of this workforce: home care workers, residential care aides, and nursing assistants in nursing homes.

Apprenticeships are structured work-based training programs that combine classroom instruction with on-the-job learning provided by a mentor at the employer’s worksite. The U.S. Department of Labor under the American Apprenticeship Initiative (AAI) sponsored an evaluation to build evidence about the effectiveness of registered apprenticeship for apprentices and employers and generate lessons for developing and operating apprenticeship programs, particularly in nontraditional occupations (occupations not related to construction). This report describes the characteristics, program experiences (e.g., occupation, wage progression), and post-program employment and earnings outcomes of participants in an AAI-supported apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship program.

There have been over a million drug overdose deaths in the United States since 1999. While this crisis is national in scope, there is considerable variation by both geography and subpopulation. One area of interest is in how changes in the labor market may be connected to increases in addiction and “deaths of despair” and, at the same time, how rising rates of drug use may be lowering overall labor force participation. This webinar recording from the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty includes presentations on trends in the U.S. opioid crisis and overdose cases related to other drugs. The presenters also examined how differences in state-level policy responses to the crisis may be leading to different labor market outcomes, and how automation and other changes in manufacturing employment may be connected to increases in working-age mortality.

In 2018, change agents within the Camden County (New Jersey) Department of Corrections introduced a five-pronged community engagement strategy to reduce the use of jail and improve reentry outcomes for people released from incarceration. Central to this strategy are the County’s NuEntry Opportunity Specialists, previously incarcerated individuals who serve as credible messengers to people released from incarceration and who work to reduce the stigma of incarceration through community education and outreach. This case study describes Camden County’s community engagement strategy and examines its implementation and reported impact. Lessons and recommendations derived from implementation of the county’s community engagement strategy and its sustainability efforts are also discussed.