Counseling Customers About Income Goals, Career Paths and Work Supports

• Seattle/King County Workforce Development Council, WA
• Chicago Workforce Board and Illinois Department of Employment Security, IL
• Maine Jobs Council
• Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, PA

Overview

The Workforce Development Council of Seattle/King County believes that the federal poverty level is an inadequate and outdated measure of economic well-being. The WDC's Board of Directors instead adopted the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington as the local criteria for measuring economic self-sufficiency in the Seattle/King County One-Stop employment and training system.

The WDC then commissioned the development of an online calculator, based on the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington, to support long-term planning with customers of WDC-funded/administered employment and training programs. The Self-Sufficiency Calculator allows customers, together with employment case managers, to test the impact of different scenarios on their long and short-term economic well-being, benchmark wages against a realistic measure of local costs of living, and identify work supports to reduce expenses. The Calculator is designed to be used in conjunction with other tools—including labor market resources and assessment tools—to conduct more in-depth, informed goal-setting and planning with customers that is focused on long-term economic self-sufficiency. Specifically, the Calculator:

• Considers customer family size and composition,
• Accounts for household earned and unearned income,
• Estimates the impact of various work supports on customer budgets,
• Allows customers to test different wage and training scenarios and consider the impact they have on work support eligibility and overall budget, and
• Factors in taxes including refundable credits.

One-Stop employment case managers were trained in use of the Calculator and required to engage customers in vocational planning (long term career goals and plan); financial planning, and identification of resources and work supports. While case managers can produce their own format in developing a plan, they must be able to document that the self-sufficiency planning took place and track the customer's progress toward achieving specific action steps outlined through the planning (see Promising Practice #6 for information about the database designed in conjunction with the Calculator to track customer progress).

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History

Over a two-year period the WDC joined other state stakeholders in developing the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington which includes information about the costs of living in the Seattle/King County area. In an effort to operationalize the Standard, and begin to move the workforce development system beyond job placement and toward a focus on economic self-sufficiency, the WDC took the initiative in creating the Self-Sufficiency Calculator.

The WDC is led by a highly committed, volunteer board of directors representing private sector business, community based organizations, organized labor, and governmental organizations. The WDC believes that jobs are a key to family economic self-sufficiency. The WDC supports job training services for more than 6,000 adults and youth annually, and is a local leader in advocacy and policy regarding workforce system needs and improvements. The WDC's mission is "to champion a workforce and learning system that allows our region to be a world leader in producing a vibrant economy, and lifelong employment and training opportunities for every resident."

The WDC pursued the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washingon and the Self-Sufficiency Calculator because it recognized the need to respond to two systemic issues:

(1) Job seekers and workforce development practitioners in the local area lacked accurate cost-of-living and wage information to set realistic career and earning goals that can lead to economic self-sufficiency. Workforce development organizations in King County work hard to deliver employment and training services that assist job seekers to find and keep jobs that enable them to pay their bills and support their families. But more often than not, these newly employed individuals experience a significant wage gap between what they are earning and what they need. WDC cites the reason for this disparity to be that workforce development practitioners strive to meet income benchmarks and wage goals that are based largely on the federal poverty level rather than a benchmark that is a more realistic indicator of what income is needed to support a family. These newly employed individuals are not poor according to the official poverty level and are "successful job placements" according to official sources, but, in fact, their incomes are not adequate to support their families or achieve a longer-term goal like economic self-sufficiency. WDC believes that long-term economic self-sufficiency is a more appropriate goal for workforce development programming.
(2) Workforce development practitioners lack necessary tools to help low-income workers make long-term career and financial plans, and qualify for state and federal work support programs. As workforce development agencies begin to make economic self-sufficiency a goal for their programs and services, intuitive and accessible tools are needed to support practitioners and their low-wage customers in developing goals, making plans, and measuring progress. Without these tools, economic self-sufficiency remains just a concept.

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Partners and Funding

The WDC contracted with the University of Washington and Dr. Diana Pearce, the author of the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington, and a software development company to design and develop the Calculator. The WDC contracted with Wider Opportunities for Women to help develop a four part self-sufficiency and vocational planning curriculum to train One-Stop Center employment case managers to help their customers create paths to self-sufficiency based on their projected individual self-sufficiency income need.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was integrating the Calculator and its varied career counseling uses into an existing system, and educating staff already balancing heavy workloads. The key to winning staff acceptance and enthusiasm was providing training, ongoing technical assistance, and opportunities for feedback. Case managers identified technical issues that needed to be addressed once full-scale implementation of the Calculator was underway, as well as numerous enhancements that contribute to the user-friendliness of the tool.

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Keys to Successful Implementation

To ensure that the Calculator was fully integrated into employment case management following the training the WDC mandated that all case managers use the Calculator with a majority of their customers and incorporate the following components into customer self-sufficiency planning:

• Vocational Planning: Identification of long-term career goals and creation of a flexible plan to reach goals.
• Financial Planning: Identification of wage requirements to support family and reach financial goals.
• Resources and work supports: Identification of support resources a customer has/needs to achieve goals and succeed in training/employment, (e.g., scholarships, loans, financial counseling, child care, housing assistance, etc.).

The WDC contracted with WOW to help develop a detailed curriculum to train case managers on how to use the Calculator and conduct self-sufficiency planning with customers. The training covers both the mechanics of using the Calculator and strategies for career counseling that work alongside the Calculator. Building on the above components, the curriculum emphasizes goal-setting while integrating use of the Calculator with other tools already in use to identify demand occupations that meet the customer's interests and that offer a career ladder to jobs meeting the customer’s self-sufficiency wage.

Self-sufficiency planning goes several steps beyond development of the conventional Individual Employment Plan, which typically ends when the customer gains employment. The self-sufficiency plan serves as a road map for progressing along a career ladder and ultimately achieving a self-sufficient wage. It is intended to be a planning tool that customers will continue to use beyond their use of WIA services.

Note: The WDC has not required use of a specific format for the self-sufficiency plan in the early stages of implementation. They encouraged One-Stop Center case managers to create a format that is meaningful and useful to the individual customer and case manager. When WDC Planners review files they look for documentation to demonstrate that the customer is engaged in self-sufficiency planning. Documentation of self-sufficiency planning activity can include:

• Printouts from computer-based tools that include results such as skills/interest inventories, lists of occupations that fit skills/interests, wages, and labor market information;
• Results from formal assessments;
• Printouts from the Calculator, including summary of test wage scenarios, wage adequacy, and impacts of work supports;
• Budgets/budget worksheets;
• Financial plans with short and long-term goals;
• Information on specific work supports (printed from the calculator or linked websites); and
• Case notes documenting action steps agreed to and referrals to services/resources.

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Model Materials

• Workforce Development Council of Seattle/King County Self-Sufficiency Calculator www.wdcssc.com/ssc/sschome.aspx
• Administrative Guidelines for using the Calculator [PDF, 64KB]
• Career Exploration Tools [PDF, 128KB]
• Career Planning for Economic Self-Sufficiency: Six Factors for Evaluating Occupations [PDF, 80KB]
• Assembling an ESS Plan [PDF, 86KB]

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