Research Reception
Research Reception
This poster session at Further Together highlighted new and innovative research focused on advancing equity in workforce development.
Thank to all of our featured presenters! Their research titles and links to posters, where available, are provided below.
Adapting EAPs for Equity: Supporting Marginalized Workplace Populations
Sahrah Marcellin | AIR
In the evolving landscape of mental health support, there exists a commitment to enhancing the emotional well-being of minoritized individuals and populations. Specialized employee assistance programs (EAPs) set out to tackle the stigma surrounding mental health by ensuring increased access to therapists specializing in specific minoritized communities. As they delved into the challenges faced by their client population, a realization emerged – workplace-related stress, fueled by microaggressions, biases, and discrimination, became a significant concern. This revelation prompted a shift towards offering services to organizations with the aim of fostering inclusive and supportive work environments. This poster explores how the unique approach of specialized EAPs can be adapted into traditional EAP models to serve marginalized populations better.
Defining a Workforce Development Training System
Tessa Forshaw | Harvard Project on Workforce
The Workforce Almanac is a first-of-its-kind initiative that aims to help us move away from a siloed conception of workforce development training provision and towards a new, integrated idea of the sector that puts the worker front and center. In the first iteration of the Workforce Almanac, almost 17,000 providers of workforce training and post-high school training opportunities have been mapped. Figure 1 provides an overview of the current context, key findings at the state and systems levels and the response to these findings.
Practice and Data Insights to Advance Racial Equity in Online Postsecondary Career and Technical Education
Amanda Briggs | Urban Institute
The CTE CoLab, an Urban-led coalition of six national partners, guided 12 community and career and technical education (CTE) colleges through a two-and-a-half year, multistep equity action planning process focused on improving outcomes and advancing racial equity in online and hybrid CTE programs. College teams worked to understand gaps in outcomes for students of color and develop and implement strategies to address barriers to success stemming from historical, systemic, and institutional factors. This report documents the equity action planning process, strategies the colleges implemented to support students, and recommendations informed by lessons learned along the way. Strategies focused on increasing student supports, centering equity in online instruction delivery, and engaging with employers. Larger institutional changes sometimes required starting small, with a committed team bringing diverse expertise, roles, and experience to advance equity. Although the initiative’s two-year timeframe proved challenging, colleges laid the groundwork to inform deeper and broader implementation of these strategies moving forward.
Building a System for Non-Degree Credential Quality: A Landscape Scan of National Organizations
Michelle Van Noy | Rutgers University
For the research project, the Rutgers Education and Employment Research Center conducted a landscape scan of the non-degree credential quality ecosystem to map out areas of activity and future directions for development of policy and practice. This scan included a review of 66 national organizations involved in influencing non-degree credential quality and interviews with 36 individuals from these organizations. Figures 2a & 2b highlights findings from this research including definitions of quality, the ways that national organizations are seeking to shape the emerging ecosystem for non-degree credential quality, and recommendations for building a more comprehensive non-degree credential quality ecosystem.
Career Journeys Redefined: Stories of Struggle, Resilience, and Triumph
Michelle Rafferty | National Fund for Workforce Solutions
This original research was presented to better understand the career journeys of workers most impacted by occupational segregation and job quality challenges. Narrated through journey maps, Figure 3 highlights key learnings from research conducted across six cities – Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Wichita. Participants in the study included workers in the following groups: Entry-level Black IT workers, Home Health Support Workers, Childcare Workers, Young Adult Learners, Black Construction Workers, Domestic Workers, and Manufacturing and Aviation Workers.
Experiences of Awe and Meaning at Work
Megan Cuzzolino | Next Level Lab
Decades of research indicate that people find the meaningfulness of their work to be more important than any other facet of their professional circumstances, including income, job security, or opportunities for advancement. Yet it is increasingly difficult for workers to find and sustain meaningful work. This study explores a surprising antidote to these difficult circumstances: moments of awe. In a survey of 65 individuals across 26 sectors, the researchers found that experiences of awe contribute to a feeling of meaning and purpose at work and provide a sense of renewed motivation in the face of challenging professional circumstances. Figure 4 provides an overview of the research, the data and practitioner takeaways.
Do Low-Income Students Stack High-Value Credentials? Differences in Credential-Stacking Between Students from Low- and Higher- Income Backgrounds
Peter Bahr | University of Michigan
This study analyzed student-level, longitudinal, administrative data from Ohio and Colorado to better understand credential-stacking among low-income certificate-earners, finding that low-income certificate-earners are more likely than higher-income certificate-earners to attempt to stack credentials, but less likely to actually stack credentials. Further, both low- and higher-income certificate-earners are most likely to stack credentials in fields that differ from the field of their first certificate, which points to probable inefficiencies. Our findings inform the efforts of state policymakers, institutional leaders, workforce partners to improve stackable credentials pathways for students from historically underserved backgrounds who may benefit most from these opportunities.
Learning, Working, and Recovering in Context: Empowering Users and Addressing Inequities with Behavioral Insights and Human-Centered Systems Design
Samia Amin | AIR
AIR combines human-centered systems design, behavioral insights, and data analytics to help government agencies understand end user journeys through key worker support programs (unemployment insurance, youth workforce programs, apprenticeship systems). The presentation describes our approach and how AIR customizes engagements with workforce staff and end users in different contexts through the findings of two projects: one through the successful use of behavioral nudges to increase youth participation in a welfare and workforce funded joint project and measured impact using a randomized controlled trial. The second project shares emergent findings from a statewide redesign of Unemployment Insurance communication materials drawing on customer insights and usability testing.
The Role of Worker Voices in Advancing Workplace DEI Efforts and Improving Employment Experiences for Workers of Color
Laurie Harrington | Heldrich Center for Workforce Development
The Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, in collaboration with Delaware State University and funded by WorkRise, the Urban Institute’s research-to-action network on jobs, workers, and mobility, fielded a national probability-based survey of 800 Black, 800 Hispanic, 600 Asian American, and 800 white workers using NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel. The survey describes how U.S. workers perceive and experience racial and ethnic inequity and discrimination in the workplace in 2022-2023 and is informed by a collaborative questionnaire design process including a pilot test, 18 in-depth interviews of workers, and conversations with leading experts on economic mobility and measuring discrimination in the workplace. Following the survey, researchers conducted 20 in-depth interviews with workers who had participated in the survey and said that racial and ethnic discrimination was a major problem in their workplaces to capture their stories about these experiences at work. Figure 5 highlights the findings from the survey and in-depth interviews with workers that describe how they think about the relationship between mobility and discrimination in their career trajectories and in what ways employee trainings, the role of chief diversity/equity officers, the design of corporate policies and the use of reporting pathways should be reimagined in the workplace.
Strengthening Workplaces: Inspiring Employers to Change Based on the Difference between what 5,000 Northeast Ohio people say they want and need in work, and what employers provide
Bishara Addison | The Fund for Our Economic Future
The poster presents research completed in Northeast Ohio to help stakeholders (including non-profits supporting job seekers, employers, civic leaders, and others) understand what workers require in order to be successful at work, particularly given business owners have been saying so loudly, “Where are the Workers?” It also summarize the impact of the research, including how the research results were shared and ongoing approaches to inspire employers for continued change and improvements in job quality.
Worker-Centered Benchmarking Project
Alex Breen | CSW
This is a participatory action research initiative designed by CSW to answer two questions: 1) How do we know if workforce programs are achieving their intended impact within the communities where they operate; 2) How do we know what communities want from workforce programs or even how success is defined? To answer these questions, CSW recruited six workforce development participants and alumni to form an advisory council, serving as the project’s primary researchers. The preliminary findings can be found in Figure 6 below and have implications for both workforce development metrics and workforce program design.
Understanding Sources of Racial Disparities in Employment
Andrew Clarkwest | Abt Associates
This presentation incorporates findings from two studies that examine racial disparities in career advancement and strategies to address them. The first study presents an analysis of a novel dataset of career trajectories of over 20,000 workers in mid-level occupations over ten years, showing that even when workers start in the same occupation at similar wages and similar educational background, workers of color and women see smaller wage gains over time. The study indicates the need for the employment and training field to address mechanisms leading to disparities in wage growth that occur once workers are employed. The second study presents findings from a comprehensive literature review of sources of racial bias in the lower-wage labor market and outlines mechanisms that lead to differences in employment outcomes that occur in all phases of the employment process, from application to post-hire processes such as job assignment, employee development, and promotions.