The impact of training and demographics in WIA program performance: A statistical analysis

✍ Scribed by Richard W. Moore; Philip C. Gorman

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 96 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1044-8004
• DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.20029

✦ Synopsis

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) measures participant labor market outcomes to drive program performance. This article uses statistical analysis to examine the relationship between participant characteristics and key outcome measures in one large California local WIA program. This study also measures the impact of different training interventions on program outcomes while controlling for participant characteristics. The findings suggest that adjusting future performance measures for participant characteristics would create more valid performance measures. Further, we find that WIA training interventions do not yield consistent positive labor market outcomes after controlling for participant demographics. Finally, we recommend directions for future research.

Policymakers have long wanted publicly funded job training programs to produce tangible labor market results for participants. During recent decades, the Department of Labor has funded a host of studies that attempt to measure the impact of training programs (King, 2004). Policymakers brought this focus on performance to the creation of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) in 1998. WIA, which replaced the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), established 17 performance measures to drive program performance. Most of these metrics were labor market outcome measures, such as changes in participants' earnings and the rate at which participants are placed in jobs. WIA' s performance policy included several other new features. First, data for labor market measures would be collected from unemployment insurance records, rather than through traditional phone or mail follow-up surveys. Second, the performance goals related to these measures would be