Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper will present the economic impacts, implementation, and cost results for the four sites in WorkAdvance, a sectoral training and advancement demonstration program. The WorkAdvance model reflects a reading of the evidence that only through deep knowledge of and relationships with employers in a particular sector can staff in programs serving low-income individuals provide the required level of specialized guidance needed for participants to succeed in their jobs and advance in their careers while also meeting employers’ demand for workers with specific skills. Program services – career readiness activities, occupational skills training, job development and placement, and postemployment retention and advancement services – were offered to individuals for up to two years after they entered the program.

 MDRC is examining the impacts and implementation of the WorkAdvance program in Tulsa, OK; New York City (two sites); and northeast Ohio. The RCT study enrolled approximately 2,600 participants between mid-2011 and mid-2013, and is using a variety of data to estimate the model’s effectiveness: administrative records and a rich follow-up survey with high response rates. (Staff and employer interviews, focus groups, and program activity records provide data for the implementation analysis.) Two years of follow-up data are available for the full sample.

 The effectiveness results for WorkAdvance – which will be finalized within the next few months – have been long anticipated because the program model is highly relevant to current policy directions. Training policy currently emphasizes: an alignment of services with employer demand, a consideration of longer-term advancement opportunities (rather than a focus on simply finding a job) and career pathways, and the provision of training that is tailored to the needs of particular industry sectors, in terms of both hard skills (such as how to operate certain machinery) and soft or “essential” skills (such as how to adjust to the “culture” of employment in that sector). WorkAdvance embodies all of these elements, and thus the impact and implementation results for the model are well-positioned to inform training policy.

Notably, the WorkAdvance impact analysis will provide the first rigorous evidence of whether the encouraging results from the Sector Employment Impacts Study (SEIS) can be replicated.  The SEIS study showed that a combination of sectoral training and employer relationships produced large impacts on earnings for programs run by three well-established sectoral training providers. Compared with the SEIS sites, WorkAdvance operated in a different economy and with a broader range of sectors and providers, but WorkAdvance has one site in common with the SEIS. This situation gives the WorkAdvance study the opportunity to indicate the scalability and replicability of a sectoral training approach while also “controlling” (in one site) for contextual changes. Thus, the important and intriguing WorkAdvance results will be able to suggest to the workforce development field whether the sectoral training approach can be effectively operated by a wide range of providers with differing levels of experience in a variety of sectors.