Recommended Actions

Do an assessment of your current workforce system’s performance in placing individuals in “springboard” jobs.

Useful questions to ask include:

• Of all job placements in our system, how many are placements into low-wage entry-level jobs?

• In which industries are these low-wage entry level jobs concentrated?

• Where is there occupational segregation among low-wage jobs?

• Do we have any indication of whether these job placements were stepping stones for our customers (e.g., individuals had increased earnings after five years)? If not, how might these data be obtained?

Identify the key elements that make entry-level jobs springboard jobs in your community. 

Use the data collected to develop your own working definition for a springboard job. Jobs for the Future’s report on springboard jobs is a good starting point.

Public workforce agencies can help make entry-level jobs and work experiences more likely to lead to upward career growth in multiple ways. Some options include:

• Wages and stipends

• Procurement incentives

• Investments in intermediaries

• Employer practices and supports

• Understanding all of the options

For more information on why this matters, check out the National Association for Colleges and Employers (NACE) report on inequity in internships. This report found that Black students and women were more likely to be unpaid interns, and first-generation and Latinx students were more likely than white students to have never interned at all.

Here are some sample metrics to get you started as you transform your internships and work experiences:

• Number of paid work experiences and internships provided by your agency, disaggregated by demographics
• Number of paid work experiences and internships provided by your agency by priority population (e.g., Opportunity Youth)
• Number of work experiences that are paid
• Number of work experiences that provide a living wage

Procurement Incentives

Funding is a powerful way to drive behavior. Whether it is through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act or Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funded programs or other public investments, your agency can drive resources to evidenced-based programs and interventions that increase the chances that a low-wage entry-level job is a stepping stone and not a destination for priority populations. Through your requests for proposal (RFP)s, you can require or incentivize  service models that demonstrate evidence in helping low-wage, entry-level workers progress in their careers over a 3- to 5-year period. We suggest scoring using the low, moderate and high levels of causal evidence outlined here. The Texas Building Trades & Construction Grant RFP, which scored applications based on an evidence framework, is a great example of this.

Below are a few evidence-based national programs that have helped turn low-wage entry-level jobs into stepping stones for priority populations:

• Youth: Year Up programs led to average earnings gains over $8,000 per year, persisting to the end of the seven-year study.
• Justice Involved: Center for Employment Opportunities participants were more likely to remain employed 3+ years later as compared to comparison groups, among other outcomes.
• Registered Apprenticeships: A US Department of Labor evaluation demonstrated that, in the ninth year following program enrollment, registered apprenticeship participants earned an average of $5,839 more than similar nonparticipants, or an estimated average of $240,037 over their careers.
• Individuals with Severe Mental Illness (SMI): The Individual Placement and Support (IPS) program model has decades of evidence of positive employment and career outcomes related to SMI recovery.
• Workforce Development, What We Know About What Works: This is an easy to read summary of the programs above and other evidenced-based interventions relevant to “springboard” job strategies.

Here are some sample measures to get you started as you shift your programming:

• Number of workers with growth in earnings three to five years after placement in a springboard job
• Number of workers making a living wage three to five years after placement in a springboard job
• Number of workers who transitioned from a low-wage entry-level job to a quality job (local definition) over a 5-year period

Investments in Intermediaries

Invest in intermediaries to build networks of “springboard” service providers to share best-practices.

Funding this backbone or intermediary work is a long-term investment that can help service providers, employers, funders and public systems come together to increase the likelihood that low-wage entry-level jobs lead to quality jobs for program participants.

For example, the Los Angeles Regional Initiative for Social Enterprise (LA:RISE) is a partnership between the city and county of Los Angeles workforce agencies and employment social enterprises to help people overcoming high employment barriers get jobs, stay employed and build a better life. Now in its seventh year, LA:RISE has nearly 50 partners and has placed more than 6,200 individuals in subsidized employment, placed more than 3,300 individuals in permanent employment or education programs and enrolled more than 4,100 individuals in Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act programs. For inspiration, check out LA:RISE's Client Referral Form, Client Flier, Program Model and Participant Flow Chart. In this case, the city, county and philanthropic organizations fund REDF through LA:RISE to provide backbone management services to manage the network, track outcomes and build capacity for service provider partners.

If you want more information on how this can drive economic mobility, check out, Economic Self-sufficiency and Life Stability One Year after Starting a Social Enterprise Job. This report demonstrates how social enterprise clients have higher employment and earnings one year after participation.

Here are some sample measures to get you started as you shift your programming:

• Number of partners co-enrolling in public system
• Number of enrollments in the public system from partnerships

Employer Practices & Supports

Develop a set of springboard job offerings, tools, and incentives within the business facing teams of your agency (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act business services representatives, Small-Business-Administration-funded Small Business Development Centers [SBDCs] and/or economic development staff) to help employers make their entry-level, low-wage jobs better stepping stones for entry-level workers.

This expertise should include outreach and awareness about the benefits of springboard jobs for talent attraction, technical assistance, subsidized wages, referrals to partners that can help maximize tax incentives for hiring, education and training and mini-grants for organizations seeking to pilot changes.

As a starting point, we recommend designing your services with the six upskilling models for employers profiled by the Aspen Institute:

1. Apprenticeship
2. Pre-employment training
3. High school completion or rquivalency
4. Employee training on-the-job
5. Certification
6. College degrees

Some offerings may be handled in-house (e.g., pre-employment training, employee training on-the-job), while others may require outside subject matter expertise (structuring a registered apprenticeship, college degree programs). The overarching goal is to make your agency the place employers can go to make their entry-level jobs have greater upward mobility.

Here are some sample measures to get you started as you build services for employers:

• Number of companies that provided springboard services
• Number of workers placed in springboard jobs as a result of springboard services

Invest in data infrastructure to understand your system’s performance on its springboard jobs strategy.

In the long term, you will need to capture and analyze earnings growth, upward career mobility and how many of your system’s low-wage entry-level job placements lead to upward career mobility (and how many do not) over a period of five years or more. Individually following up with individuals is not practical. We recommend tapping into statewide administrative data to set up infrastructure and reporting without burdening staff. 

For example, the Kentucky Center for Statistics (KYstats) collects and links data to evaluate education and workforce efforts in the commonwealth, including linking education and employment records to determine if Kentucky graduates are entering the workforce and earning a reasonable wage, how well colleges are meeting the needs of industries and what the return on investment is for education and training programs. This report from Jobs for the Future and the US Department of Labor shows how Kansas, Missouri and Massachusetts are using administrative data for similar efforts.