The Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program’s two-part Financial Resilience series will highlight the foundational role benefits play in supporting household financial resilience, elevate the insights and work of benefit leaders, and discuss the opportunities for scale and innovations needed in public benefits and workplace benefits. Part 2 of this webinar series, Modernizing Workplace Benefits to Support Financial Resilience, will take place on November 17, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. EDT. This webinar will highlight a new framework for financial resilience which showcases the importance of workplace benefits in holistically supporting households to manage and mitigate the impact of financial shocks. Speakers will explore commitments by private sector leaders to support workers’ financial resilience and elevate the benefit innovators: investors, benefit providers and administrators, employees, and fintech. These innovators are currently leading the way to modernize workplace benefits and scale innovations to ensure all workers and their families are financially resilient. The first webinar occurred on October 13, 2022.

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.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families by teaching them skills to improve communication and conflict management, how to recognize the characteristics of healthy romantic relationships, and how to strengthen existing relationships. HMRE programs may pair a relationship skills curriculum with other services, such as individualized job development or instruction on financial planning, that aim to promote economic stability or content on parenting skills. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

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.

WorkRise will host a set of webinars from October 18 to October 20, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET as part of a three-day conference entitled, "Charting a Resilient Future for US Workers: Solutions to Navigate an Uncertain Economy." The webinars will highlight the highs and lows that workers and families have faced as a result of seismic shifts in the economy. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a once-in-a-lifetime economic shock, followed by a robust government response to stabilize the economy. Nearly three years later, a tight labor market has led to historic wage growth and better jobs—particularly for workers earning low wages. Inflation, however, has undermined these gains, and policies to control prices could lead to higher unemployment. Longer-term trends such as income inequality, automation, climate change, and demographic shifts pose uncertainty for the present and future of work.

The conference explores the challenge and promise of the current moment, innovative policies and practices aimed at improving job quality and economic mobility, and creative, cross-sector solutions that are turning risk into resilience so that workers, businesses, and communities can thrive. Each day’s webinar will be anchored around a specific theme – The Challenge and Promise of the Current Moment (October 18); Innovative Practices to Shape the Future of Work (October 19); Turning Threats into Opportunity (October 20) – with presentations from stakeholder networks, including workers, employers, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and advocates who will share actionable insights and solutions to navigate the road ahead. Workers will also share reflections on their experiences with economic uncertainty and their hopes about the future.

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a novel program that sought to integrate Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) into an employment training program for young adults. To develop and implement the program, Family and Workforce Centers of America, a long-standing provider of employment training in St. Louis, Missouri, enhanced one of its traditional employment training programs to include lessons from a widely implemented relationship education curriculum, along with additional content on workplace relationship skills and personal finances. The integrated program called Career STREAMS (Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services) offered daily workshops for two weeks covering employment-related topics and information on HMRE, weekly booster sessions following the workshops, and individualized case management and job development services. This report documents the study methods, describes program costs and implementation, and presents program impacts after one year.

For much of 2022, the U.S. has enjoyed an unusually strong labor market. Unemployment is historically low, and job creation is well above the level needed to keep pace with population growth. By some measures, such as wage growth, the labor market is especially solid for many lower-wage workers. However, this does not mean that all workers are participating in the labor market at the rates they had prior to the pandemic. This blogpost summarizes research indicating less-educated couples became more likely during the COVID-19 pandemic to include only one labor force participant. The findings indicate that parents of young children report that caregiving is increasingly the reason given for their labor force nonparticipation.