Young adults are invaluable members of our labor market and bring critical talent, capacity, skill, and innovation to the workforce. However, many young adults—especially those ages 16-24 from low-income communities—face significant barriers in the labor market. This fact sheet provides resources, key metrics, and information about how Registered Apprenticeship can support young adults.

The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA) will host a webinar on December 15, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET which will discuss how Job Centers can successfully place individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) in employment through Individual Placement and Support (IPS). IPS is evidence-based supported employment for people with behavioral health conditions and places them in job opportunities that interest them and play to their strengths.

For young parents juggling work, school, and child care, supporting their families while transitioning into adulthood can be challenging. Parents with low incomes and those who have been involved with the foster care or criminal legal systems face even greater barriers to achieving stability. To explore how organizations can improve young parents’ employment and educational opportunities, this blogpost reflects findings from interviews with representatives of three partners involved in the Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) initiative. (LEAP™ is a multi­million dollar initiative to increase employment and educational opportunities for young people, ages 14 to 25, who are in foster care, homeless, or exiting the juvenile justice system.) Interviews were held with staff members at two LEAP cohort members—the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation and The Door in New York City—as well as with Hennepin Healthcare, a Minnesota organization that collaborates with Project for Pride in Living, another LEAP cohort member. The answers they shared highlight the importance of convening cross-sector partners to work toward common goals, connecting with other organizations to meet parents’ basic needs, and navigating public systems to remove barriers and help young people achieve their goals.

Across two rounds of grants, the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program aimed to provide education and training to 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 brief highlights key findings from the Final Annual Report of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program, 2015-2021, and presents information describing HPOG 2.0 including the training and services received and outcomes obtained by those who participated. The report includes all 32 grantees’ and participants’ experiences from HPOG 2.0’s start on September 30, 2015, to its end on September 29, 2021.

The Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research (CLEAR) of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) 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 Office 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 second webinar in this series, How to Use CLEAR for Decision-Making, will be held on November 16, 2022 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET. Following a presentation from DOL’s Chief Evaluation Office, participants will learn more about the different ways CLEAR summarizes information and hear from a panel of workforce leaders on how they use CLEAR.

Social services programs are increasingly looking for ways to forecast which participants are likely to reach major milestones so they can tailor services and allocate resources. In recent years, some programs have explored advanced predictive modeling approaches that harness potentially millions of data points and may incorporate machine learning: a variety of algorithms that determine relationships between prediction measures and the outcome. While there is potential for social service programs to use advanced models, MDRC’s Center for Data Insights (CDI) has found that such methods are not always better at making reliable predictions and come with trade-offs. This post outlines CDI’s approach to predictive analytics, using illustrations from two studies: Career Pathways, a workforce training program, and Child First, a home visiting program.

This year celebrates the 85th anniversary of the passing of the National Apprenticeship Act of 1937, which established the Registered Apprenticeship Program. To celebrate National Apprenticeship Week, the Center for Advancing Policy on Employment for Youth (CAPE-Youth) will host a webinar on November 15, 2022 at 4:00 p.m. ET with apprenticeship intermediaries, which are organizations with the capacity, expertise, and network to help businesses successfully create, launch, and expand apprenticeship programs. During the webinar, these organizations will explore the evolution of apprenticeship in general, and for people with disabilities specifically. The webinar will provide a brief overview of inclusive apprenticeships and feature speakers from three to four apprenticeship intermediaries who will discuss their advancement efforts and best practices to ensure apprenticeships are inclusive of youth and young adults with disabilities.

Employment service providers looking to replicate evidence-based interventions will likely face challenges in determining how to implement the most important elements, or core components, of those interventions. In the absence of quantitative data on core components for an intervention, employment service providers can use qualitative strategies to carefully determine how to implement an intervention. This brief explores those strategies, providing guidance that may be useful to employment service providers and other human services agency staff who want to replicate evidence-based interventions.

Approximately 20,000 young adults in foster care transition to adulthood and independent living each year. A majority of these young people want to pursue postsecondary education, but they are less likely to enroll in postsecondary institutions than their peers who have not interacted with the child welfare system. To address this gap, federal and state programs have been implemented to address barriers and provide supports to pursue a college degree. In 2001, as an amendment to the Chafee Foster Care Independence Act, the Education and Training Voucher (ETV) program became the first federal program aimed to assist young adults in or formerly in foster care with their postsecondary educational needs. This report uses administrative data from 10 states to describe how ETV programs operate, who receives ETV vouchers, how and when they are used, and the educational outcomes for young adults who receive ETVs compared with their peers who do not receive ETVs.

Service providers, policymakers, and researchers need to know how likely specific interventions are to improve employment and related outcomes if implemented in a particular setting with clients. In practice, most employment interventions offer a combination of services that are designed to improve labor market outcomes (e.g., employment, earnings, education and training, and public benefit receipt). The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse has undertaken a series of research syntheses to explore what one can learn by looking across all the data the Pathways Clearinghouse has collected. This report uses an approach that synthesizes relationships across multiple studies to provide new evidence on the likelihood that specific interventions will improve labor market outcomes and which combinations of services are most likely to be effective for different groups of people.