Evidence Snapshot: Employment Coaching

Publication Date: January 7, 2022
Pathways Employment Coaching Evidence Snapshot Cover

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  • Published: 2022

Introduction

Research Questions

  1. What does the evidence say about interventions for people with low incomes that include employment coaching?
  2. Do interventions that use employment coaching increase earnings, employment, education or training, and do they reduce the receipt of public benefits?
  3. What are the most effective interventions using employment coaching?

Employment coaching involves a collaborative, goal setting process between a coach and client to help the client get a job and build the skills necessary to achieve their goals (OPRE 2019). This evidence snapshot summarizes what rigorous research can tell us about 18 interventions that used employment coaching with people with low incomes and the interventions’ impacts on earnings, employment, the receipt of public benefits, and education and training. The data comes from high- or moderate-quality studies conducted between 1990 and 2019 and reviewed by the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse.

Purpose

This brief evidence snapshot describes the effectiveness of programs that were identified by the Pathways Clearinghouse as using employment coaching. It summarizes what we know about these programs and their impacts on employment, earnings, and related outcomes for people with low incomes so that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families administrators, policymakers, researchers, and the general public can apply the evidence to questions and contexts that matter to them.

Key Findings and Highlights

On average, interventions that use employment coaching improved outcomes, especially earnings and education and training. In particular, for intervention participants as compared with comparison groups that did not receive intervention services:  

  • Short-term annual earnings increased by $696 and long-term annual earnings increased by $639, on average, across the 14 interventions that measured the impact of employment coaching on earnings.
  • Short-term and long-term employment increased by an average of 1 percentage point across the 16 interventions that examined these outcomes.
  • On average, within studies measuring public benefits, short-term benefit receipt did not change, long-term benefit receipt increased by 1 percentage point, and the amount of public benefits received increased by $30 in the short term and $137 in the long term.
  • Education and training attainment increased by 13 percentage points across the six studies that measured changes in education.
  • Three interventions with employment coaching improved more than one type of outcome.

Methods

The Pathways Clearinghouse assigned an effectiveness rating to each intervention in each of four outcome domains: earnings, employment, public benefit receipt, and education and training. The rating describes whether the intervention is likely to produce favorable results in that domain if faithfully replicated with a similar population.

For this snapshot, the Pathways Clearinghouse calculated the average impact for each domain by averaging impacts within moderate- and high-quality studies, then within interventions (there may be multiple studies on a single intervention), and then across interventions that use employment coaching. The average includes all studies, not just those with a supported rating or statistically significant findings, because these studies still provide useful evidence in considering the overall effectiveness of employment coaching.

This snapshot describes the interventions using employment coaching that had positive impacts on earnings, employment, public benefit receipt, and education and training, and highlights interventions that were effective in multiple outcome domains.

Citation

Cattell, Lindsay, Jillian Stein, and Dana Rotz (2021). Evidence Snapshot: Employment Coaching. OPRE Report # 2021-190, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Glossary

Employment coaching:
The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse defines employment coaching as intensive, collaborative assistance with identifying and addressing employment barriers and goals. However, employment coaching can be defined in different ways and the Pathways Clearinghouse relied on authors' language and definitions to classify interventions.