This year celebrates the 85th anniversary of the passing of the National Apprenticeship Act of 1937, which established the Registered Apprenticeship Program. To celebrate National Apprenticeship Week, the Center for Advancing Policy on Employment for Youth (CAPE-Youth) will host a webinar on November 15, 2022 at 4:00 p.m. ET with apprenticeship intermediaries, which are organizations with the capacity, expertise, and network to help businesses successfully create, launch, and expand apprenticeship programs. During the webinar, these organizations will explore the evolution of apprenticeship in general, and for people with disabilities specifically. The webinar will provide a brief overview of inclusive apprenticeships and feature speakers from three to four apprenticeship intermediaries who will discuss their advancement efforts and best practices to ensure apprenticeships are inclusive of youth and young adults with disabilities.

Employment service providers looking to replicate evidence-based interventions will likely face challenges in determining how to implement the most important elements, or core components, of those interventions. In the absence of quantitative data on core components for an intervention, employment service providers can use qualitative strategies to carefully determine how to implement an intervention. This brief explores those strategies, providing guidance that may be useful to employment service providers and other human services agency staff who want to replicate evidence-based interventions.

Approximately 20,000 young adults in foster care transition to adulthood and independent living each year. A majority of these young people want to pursue postsecondary education, but they are less likely to enroll in postsecondary institutions than their peers who have not interacted with the child welfare system. To address this gap, federal and state programs have been implemented to address barriers and provide supports to pursue a college degree. In 2001, as an amendment to the Chafee Foster Care Independence Act, the Education and Training Voucher (ETV) program became the first federal program aimed to assist young adults in or formerly in foster care with their postsecondary educational needs. This report uses administrative data from 10 states to describe how ETV programs operate, who receives ETV vouchers, how and when they are used, and the educational outcomes for young adults who receive ETVs compared with their peers who do not receive ETVs.

Service providers, policymakers, and researchers need to know how likely specific interventions are to improve employment and related outcomes if implemented in a particular setting with clients. In practice, most employment interventions offer a combination of services that are designed to improve labor market outcomes (e.g., employment, earnings, education and training, and public benefit receipt). The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse has undertaken a series of research syntheses to explore what one can learn by looking across all the data the Pathways Clearinghouse has collected. This report uses an approach that synthesizes relationships across multiple studies to provide new evidence on the likelihood that specific interventions will improve labor market outcomes and which combinations of services are most likely to be effective for different groups of people.

Largely due to the opioid crisis, the federal government has increased its focus on and funding for programs that address both treatment and employment outcomes for people with substance use disorder (SUD). Programs that combine employment services with SUD treatment or recovery efforts aim to achieve the dual goals of sustaining recovery and improving economic well-being. This report documents five programs that combine SUD treatment and recovery services with employment services. It also offers recommendations for those already implementing similar programs or interested in developing them.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Clearinghouse for Labor and Evaluation and Research (CLEAR) has been the agency’s flagship clearinghouse for the past 10 years with a mission to make labor research more accessible for use in decision-making. The CLEAR team conducts independent systematic reviews designed to identify and summarize high quality labor-related evaluation and research studies, answer “what works?” questions, and support evidence-based decision making on labor policies and programs.

In recognition of its 10-year milestone, the Department’s Chief Evaluation Officer will be conducting a series of three webinars which are designed to introduce or refresh stakeholders on what CLEAR is and how to use it. The first webinar in this series, CLEAR 101: An Introduction to CLEAR, will be held on October 25, 2002 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Webinar panelists will guide participants to learn CLEAR fundamentals and how to navigate CLEAR’s website and information. Subsequent webinars will be held on November 16, 2022 and December 13, 2022; updates will appear in upcoming PeerTA newsletters.

Soft skills, also known as “noncognitive,” “employability,” “baseline,” or “twenty-first-century” skills, are the capabilities and habits that affect social-emotional abilities related to communication, social interactions, and problem-solving. This blogpost covers findings from a series of interviews with employers to gauge how they perceive the value and authority of soft-skills credentials and to learn what could increase their utility and credibility. Additionally, the blogpost notes that employers made clear that they value work and academic experiences that relate to candidates’ skills more than they value soft-skills credentials.

Engaging job seekers in apprenticeship has a multitude of barriers to overcome depending on the community. For instance, younger generations may not be interested because it is seen as a long-term effort to receive monetary rewards. Others who are not English speaking may find apprenticeship daunting. The National Association of Workforce Development Professionals will host a webinar session on October 26, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. CT to provide tools and information on how to address job seeker barriers to apprenticeship. Speakers include staff from West Michigan Works.

Mathematica will host an interactive webinar on October 13, 2022 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET which will explore and discuss three Evidence Snapshots created by the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse. The Snapshots cover employment coaching, financial incentives, and subsidized employment and transitional jobs.

The webinar will include an interactive discussion among panelists from Mathematica and the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, which will address the following questions:

• Which interventions featuring an employment coaching component improve the employment and earnings of people with low incomes?
• Which interventions with a focus on financial incentives are the most effective overall, and which outcomes do they improve?
• Which subsidized employment and transitional jobs interventions improve outcomes for participants?

There will also be a separate interactive breakout session to each of the three snapshots during the webinar where participants can learn more about the types of services in which they are most interested.

Between 2010 and 2021, the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program funded two rounds of grants (referred to as HPOG 1.0 and HPOG 2.0) for education, training, support services, and employment assistance to prepare Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other adults with low incomes for occupations in the healthcare field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. This report examines the career progress and wage outcomes of participants in HPOG 2.0. The report compares the value of completing multiple entry-level trainings or obtaining multiple entry-level credentials against completing one entry-level training or obtaining one entry-level credential. Information is included that can help future program operators consider whether the time and cost for participants to take multiple entry-level trainings or obtain multiple credentials will lead to improved employment opportunities.