Foundation for an Independent Tomorrow: Treatment Effects of the Stages of Employment Job Readiness Program on Program Completion and Employment Outcomes for Ex-Offenders

摘要

Foundation for an Independent Tomorrow (FIT) is a local not for profit organization that seeks to assist residents of Southern Nevada by providing workforce development services (e.g., interviewing skills, job searching techniques, resume assistance) to increase a program participant’s opportunities to obtain and maintain employment. FIT is currently being federally funded through the Department of Labor’s Workforce Investment Act (WIA) grant, with a specific goal of serving the re-entry, or ex-offender, population. This population presents with a very unique set of barriers to obtaining employment, and in order to combat these barriers, FIT created the Stages of Employment job readiness course to better serve this specialized population.HPH Consulting met with FIT’s program director and was commissioned to evaluate the effectiveness of the Stages of Employment job readiness course, with a specific look at the duration of the course and its impact on employment outcomes. FIT provided HPH with data from the completion of their first program year, which resulted in a sample size of 452 participants. Once the data was cleaned and compiled, the resulting population of the sample was 61. With a population smaller than expected, HPH decided to create two separate data sets, one to study the impact to program completion (N = 94) and the other to study annual salary (N = 61).The results of the regression analyses were for the most part insignificant, with few regression models showing significant impact on program completion or annual salary. These results may be due to the fact that the Stages of Employment job readiness program was not mandatory the first year, as well as experimentation with the program duration. HPH recommends a comprehensive cohort study be conducted after the completion of FIT’s third contract year.