Digging Deeper Into What Works: What Services Improve Labor Market Outcomes, and for Whom?

This report refines and synthesizes findings from the Pathways Clearinghouse to assess which interventions and services will most likely lead to improved labor market outcomes for various groups of people. The Pathways Clearinghouse systematically evaluates and summarizes the evidence of their effectiveness.

The researchers focused on findings related to three questions:

• What are the most effective interventions in the Pathways Clearinghouse?
• Which services and combinations have the highest probability of improving outcomes?
• Which services are most effective based on the characteristics of study participants?

The researchers refined and synthesized the findings from the Pathways Clearinghouse to assess which interventions and services will most likely lead to improved labor market outcomes for various groups of people. They refined the evidence by identifying the primary service offered by each intervention and the populations served by each intervention and by grouping outcomes and standardizing impacts across studies. They synthesized the evidence using Bayesian meta-regression, a methodological approach that enabled them to distill all available information into assessing the probability that an intervention, service, or combination of services would improve outcomes in a future implementation.

Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers can use this report to identify the interventions and the combination of services provided by those interventions that are most likely to improve labor market outcomes for different groups. This information can inform decisions about which services to fund, recommend, implement, or study further.

(This report is 17 pages long.)

(This study began in 2019 with publication in 2022.)

The researchers identified the following selected findings:

• Twelve of the 127 interventions examined for this analysis have more than a 90 percent probability of improving labor market outcomes for participants.
• Interventions focused on work and work-based learning has the highest probability of improving outcomes relative to interventions focused on delivering other services.
• Interventions focused on work and work-based learning has a 72 percent probability of improving labor market outcomes (including earnings, employment, education and training, and public benefit receipt) and a 92 percent probability of improving employment outcomes specifically.
• Interventions focused on work and work-based learning were most effective when combined with employment services; these interventions have an 80 percent probability of improving outcomes when combined with work and work-based learning.
• No single primary service is particularly likely to improve outcomes by a substantial amount (by at least $1,000 in annual earnings).
• Though interventions focused on work and work-based learning have the highest probability of improving outcomes by any amount, they are among the least likely to improve outcomes by a substantial amount relative to interventions focused on delivering other services (a 21 percent probability of improving outcomes by an amount equivalent to $1,000 or more).
• Interventions focused on subsidized and transitional jobs are the most likely to improve outcomes by an amount equivalent to $1,000 or more (a 32 percent probability).
• The likelihood that an intervention offering a particular primary service improves outcomes differs depending on the characteristics of the population being studied. However, interventions focused on work, work-based learning, employment retention services, case management, and other supports typically have the highest probability of improving outcomes in interventions serving primarily people from racial or ethnic minority groups, women, and people with disabilities.

The researchers proposed the following recommendations:

• To better understand how best to design interventions to improve outcomes for specific population groups, more research is needed to estimate and report the impacts of interventions separately for separate groups of people.
• More research into these programs is needed to understand how the most highly effective interventions achieved their outcomes.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2022
• Author(s): Shiferaw, L.; Thal, D.
• Funding Source: Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies