This National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC) workshop will discuss strategies to make workplaces and workforce transition programs inclusive for youth with disabilities. These strategies ensure that outreach content on social media, physical workspaces, and documents given to youth employees are accessible for all and can be implemented without any programming experience. Additional strategies will cover actions that supervisors and coworkers can take to make youth employees with disabilities feel included. This NYEC virtual workshop will take place on July 11, 2024 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET and aims to give youth workforce specialists and employers tips on making sure youth employees with disabilities can succeed and feel included in their workplaces.

The University of Arizona’s Sonoran Center for Excellence in Disabilities is hosting a webinar on July 16, 2024 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. MT, which will cover Pre-Employment Transition Services and highlight Work Base Learning Experiences (WBLEs). Speakers will discuss how the Center for Excellence in Disabilities is working collaboratively with Window Rock Unified School District to develop WBLEs for their transition-aged students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, workforce programs that provide employment and training services faced new challenges as they responded to public health restrictions and shifts in the needs of employers and job seekers. As part of the Building Evidence on Employment Strategies (BEES) project, researchers conducted virtual interviews from November 2021–April 2022 with staff members at 10 such programs to learn about how they used technology to adapt their services during the pandemic. Anticipating the end of restrictions on in-person service delivery as the pandemic slowed, many program staff members intended to maintain some of their newly developed virtual strategies, using a hybrid model that would blend in-person and virtual service delivery. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation snapshot highlights three lessons that demonstrate how workforce programs leveraged a crisis to create important opportunities for streamlining and improving services.

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.

Many low-income working parents rely on subsidized childcare. The program supports qualifying families to work or attend school, many of whom may be unable to afford market-rate childcare. Examining parents’ income and employment patterns can guide policymakers to optimally structure subsidized childcare to support sustained employment and improve program engagement. This Chapin Hall brief series focuses on the work, school, and childcare engagement of Illinois families enrolled in the Child Care Assistance Program. This brief series includes:

1. Parental Need for Child Care Assistance;
2. Where Parents Work; and
3. Earnings & Child Care Assistance After One Year. 

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.

The Knowledge Works initiative from the Office of Child Support Services helps child support agencies implement or enhance a noncustodial parent employment program by highlighting the work of successful programs in other jurisdictions. This compendium of resources can help assess programs, plan, implement, and determine funding sources to develop child support-led noncustodial parent employment programs.

This compendium includes overviews of existing model programs; planning tools, policy resources, and funding guidance; resources that show “What Works”; sample documents, forms, and templates; and assistance with establishing a noncustodial parent employment program.