The National Association of Workforce Development Professionals will host a webinar on September 15, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CT which will cover how workforce professionals have the opportunity at every customer touch point to make an impact, even through the smallest interactions.

This webinar focuses on making excellence the standard, not the exception, and identifies strategies and tactics to help professionals become more excellent. The webinar will discuss ways to increase excellence in customer interactions, in workspaces, in emotional intelligence, in connections with partners, and in programs. Learning objectives include:

• Defining and understanding what excellence is, and what excellence is not.
• Distinguishing average and excellent, and learning strategies to pursue excellence in every customer interaction.
• Role playing, using specific situations that front line staff face, and taking that situation and implementing strategies to ensure staff are operating in excellence, even in difficult situations.

A registration fee for attendance is required.

Since the establishment of the Child Support Enforcement Program in 1975, child support policy has played a central role in improving the economic circumstances of children living apart from one of their parents. Prior research has documented the policy’s positive effects on family economic wellbeing at the time of receipt. But little work has examined the effects of child support receipt as a child on economic outcomes in adulthood. This report uses analytic approaches to test whether adults who received support as children have higher earnings, are more likely to be employed, have lower public program participation, receive less in public benefits, and are less likely to have an open child support case than those who did not receive child support or received very little.

This article discusses how partners within the County of San Diego formed two programs, Developmental Screening & Enhancement Program (DSEP) and KidSTART, aimed at ensuring that children in foster care 5 years old or younger receive needed services to maintain placement stability, achieve timely permanency, and reach their full potential. Both programs operate under Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. DSEP provides developmental and behavior screening and service linkages for all young children involved with the County of San Diego’s Child Welfare Services (CWS), while KidSTART provides comprehensive services to young children with complex needs, regardless of system involvement.

This blog offers an array of sources for understanding special population characteristics and demographics in the labor force, and for using labor market information to help target services and design service delivery to special populations. These populations could include (but are not limited to) veterans, older workers, long term employed, or disabled individuals. Included are key workforce data sources for planning and designing services to special populations, data sources for program staff to use in service delivery, and tools and training to access and utilize data sources effectively.

Mentoring is integral to apprenticeship programs and plays a critical role in the success and retention of young apprentices. Mentors can help apprentices navigate the workplace, develop a combination of essential and technical skills, and deepen their engagement. In turn, mentors find value in developing leadership and management skills and sharing organizational insights. This fact sheet highlights the importance of mentoring in youth apprenticeship programs. It illustrates mentor roles and the ways mentors teach and advise. Also, the fact sheet provides some reflective questions mentors can ask as well as real-life challenging examples that mentors can use.

The Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) project uses rapid learning cycles in an effort to improve the enrollment, engagement, and retention of fathers in nine current federal Fatherhood Family-focused, Interconnected, Resilient, and Essential (FIRE) grantees and one former recipient of a federal fatherhood grant. This brief illustrates how SIRF and program teams used a human-centered design technique called customer journey mapping, a collaborative process that puts the needs and goals of participants at the center of efforts to design or improve a product or service. Mapping helped both the program and SIRF teams to better understand fathers’ program experiences and perspectives, and to identify where program processes might be restructured to increase fathers’ participation.

This brief describes the experiences of nine families with low incomes and their children during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March through September 2020. The research was conducted by interviews with 9 adults from three major U.S. cities in September 2020. Its key findings were that families experienced a sense of uncertainty and constant, unpredictable change in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, as the pandemic evolved, the multiple life fluctuations it caused significantly affected their economic circumstances and emotional well-being.

The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse convened its annual event, Leading the DRIVE: A Fatherhood Summit on Diversity, Reentry, Inclusion, Vision and Employment, on June 15-16, 2022. At this event, there was a session entitled Employment - Innovative Approaches to Enhance the Economic Stability of Fathers and Their Families, which was moderated by Kenneth Braswell, Project Director of the Clearinghouse. This video recording of the session includes discussion from practitioners who have used innovative approaches to help fathers increase their educational qualifications, sharpen their job skills, connect with employers, and enhance the economic stability of themselves and their families.

This OPRE report provides key findings from the Childhood and Family Experiences Study which seeks to understand how children, adolescents, and parents who participate in social safety net programs such as TANF perceive and experience poverty. The report notes the study is interested in learning more about the perspectives of those who may be eligible for social safety net services but do not receive them.

For Black learners and workers, who too often grapple with discriminatory systems and practices in education and the workplace, professional social capital can unlock opportunities for greater economic advancement and mobility, ultimately reducing racial income, employment, advancement, and wealth gaps. This brief identifies five elements designed to help Black learners and workers build professional social capital: elevating current assets, building relationships, making connections and introductions, career onboarding, and a continuous learning journey. The brief’s authors based their conclusions on in-depth research that included a dive into the history and context of professional social capital, a comprehensive look at the programs that are doing this work and the strategies they employ, and assessments of emerging trends and areas of opportunity.