This brief from the Transitional Jobs Network highlights a variety of models currently being used to connect homeless individuals with employment. Models highlighted include transitional jobs, individualized placement support, alternative staffing, customized employment, contextualized basic adult education, adult education bridge programs, and sector-based training. Within each model, a program example is provided for readers to better understand how the strategy is being used in the real world.

MDRC released a new policy brief that discusses a new skills-building model designed to help low-income adults prepare for, enter, and succeed in quality jobs in high-demand fields with opportunities for career growth. WorkAdvance uses strategies found in sector-based employment programs, combined with career coaching after participants are placed into jobs.

The Associated Press and National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) Center for Public Affairs released a report on a two-part study conducted to better understand how lower-wage workers and employers think about jobs and opportunities for advancing workers' careers. This study revealed six critical issues with the potential to inform the policy conversation around investments in America's new economy and the workers who help drive it.

This toolkit is a step-by-step guide to designing and implementing employee learning and career advancement projects for frontline workers. Created by Jobs for the Future, the toolkit is a guidebook for job-site practitioners of workforce development: human resources managers, staff developers, and others responsible for employee learning through union-based programs, community colleges, technical schools, and community-based organizations. The toolkit is organized to serve newcomers to work-based earning and those with prior experience but seeking to learn more. It is also a resource for those seeking effective models on specific topics, such as designing curricula based on work objectives or training supervisors to coach or mentor frontline workers. While these resources and examples originate in health care, they are readily adaptable to other work settings and occupations.

MDRC issued a report on the Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC), an innovative program designed to increase the incomes of low-wage workers. The program offered participating workers intensive employment retention and advancement services, including career coaching and access to skills training. It also offered them easier access to work supports in an effort to increase their incomes in the short run and help stabilize their employment. The findings showed that increased access to training for low-income workers appears to be a critical part of any advancement strategy, yet the earnings gains associated with participation in training may be short-lived if participants are not given more guidance about the right types of training to pursue or opportunities for additional training.

From MDRC, this report presents findings from Britain’s Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration program, which was designed to improve the employment prospects of low-paid and long-term unemployed individuals. Researchers analyzed take-up, service delivery, and outcomes of the program and found that the program increased the likelihood of participants taking occupationally relevant courses and training, which may have been impacted by advisory support and financial incentives.

This report summarizes the final impact results for the national Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project. This project tested, using a random assignment design, the effectiveness of numerous programs intended to promote steady work and career advancement. All the programs targeted current and former welfare recipients and other low-wage workers, most of whom were single mothers. Given that earlier retention and advancement initiatives studied for these groups were largely not effective, ERA sought to examine a variety of programs that states and localities had developed for different populations, to determine whether effective strategies could be identified. In short, nine of the twelve programs examined in this report do not appear to be effective, but three programs increased employment levels, employment stability, and/or earnings, relative to control group levels, after three to four years of follow-up.

Key Findings:

 - Out of the twelve programs included in the report, three ERA programs produced positive economic impacts; nine did not. All three programs increased employment retention and advancement. Increases in employment retention and earnings were largest and most consistent over time in the Texas ERA program in Corpus Christi (one of three sites that operated this program); the Chicago ERA program; and the Riverside County, California, Post-Assistance Self-Sufficiency (PASS) ERA program. These programs increased annual earnings by between 7 percent and 15 percent relative to control group levels. Each of them served a different target group, which suggests that employment retention and advancement programs can work for a range of populations. However, three-fourths of the ERA programs included in this report did not produce gains in targeted outcomes beyond what control group members were able to attain on their own with the existing services and supports available in the ERA sites.

 - Increases in participation beyond control group levels were not consistent or large, which may have made it difficult for the programs to achieve impacts on employment retention and advancement. Engaging individuals in employment and retention services at levels above what they would have done in the absence of the programs was a consistent challenge. In addition, staff had to spend a lot of time and resources on placing unemployed individuals back into jobs, which made it difficult for them to focus on helping those who were already working to keep their jobs or move up.

Before the ERA project began, there was not much evidence about the types of programs that could improve employment retention and advancement outcomes for current or former welfare recipients. The ERA evaluation provides valuable insights about the nature of retention and advancement problems and it underscores a number of key implementation challenges that a program would have to address. In addition, it reveals shortcomings in a range of common approaches now in use, while identifying three distinct approaches that seem promising and worthy of further exploration. (author abstract)

This 12-page practitioner brief focuses on one aspect of the ERA programs — that is, their strategies to reemploy the many program participants who quickly lost jobs. Limited rigorous evidence is available on reemployment strategies. Moreover, the ERA evaluation was not designed to test the effectiveness of the specific strategies discussed in this document. However, the experiences — successful or not — across the ERA programs can provide important lessons for developing or operating employment programs for current and former welfare recipients. The reemployment services that were offered to newly unemployed individuals are similar to job placement services in programs that target unemployed populations generally, but there are differences, particularly in using recent job loss as a learning tool in finding the next job.

While preventing job loss can be an appropriate goal for retention and advancement programs, the ERA study illustrates how challenging it is to keep individuals in a particular job. Programs might consider redefining “retention” as sustained employment across jobs rather than as sustained employment in any one job. The focus in this brief is on how to address job loss once it has happened: structuring job search and job placement services for those who have recently lost their jobs, with the goal of reducing the length of unemployment, improving the quality of the new job over the previous one, and achieving greater employment stability over time. The lessons address three overarching questions:

How can programs learn about participants’ job losses quickly?

Which strategies might contribute to faster reemployment?

How can managers organize staff and resources to address job loss?  (author abstract)