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Much still needs to be learned about what programs and strategies are effective in helping adults with low incomes to achieve employment goals and better support their families. Recently, some Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs and other employment programs have tried employment coaching—a new and fundamentally different approach to how program staff interact with program participants. A key difference between coaching and more typical interactions between program staff and participants is that coaches are not directive. The coach does not specify goals for participants, develop plans to achieve those goals, or tell them what to do next. Rather, coaches guide participants in a collaborative process in which the participants determine their own goals and develop plans to achieve them.
Participants and coaches interviewed for this hub talk about their experience with employment coaching
This hub was designed to help policymakers and practitioners who are thinking about funding, implementing, or expanding the use of employment coaching. The information on the hub comes from a study of four employment coaching programs called the Evaluation of Employment Coaching for TANF and Related Populations & Long-term Follow-up Study.
In the videos on this page, program participants and coaches describe some personal success stories. These videos were selected to illustrate important findings from the study but were not part of the data collection and analysis used to generate those findings. Additional stories from these and other participants, coaches, and staff members appear throughout the hub.
By clicking on the links below or the tabs in the navigation box to the left, you can learn more about employment coaching, participants’ experiences, and the study’s findings.
- What is employment coaching? To get more details about the characteristics of employment coaching.
- Coaching and self-regulation skills.To learn about how coaching aims to improve participants’ self-regulation skills, employment, and well-being.
- Meet the coaching programs. To learn more about the four employment coaching programs in the study.
- Implementing coaching. To learn more about the four programs’ experiences implementing employment coaching.
- Impacts of coaching. To view study findings about how the programs affected participants’ outcomes so far.
- Coaching resources. To find additional resources to learn more about employment coaching.
The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, contracted with Mathematica and its partners, Abt Associates, MDRC, and The Adjacent Possible, to conduct this study. The study has two parts, one that describes how each program was implemented and a second that measures how each program impacted the lives of its participants. Click here for more information about the design of the study.