The Employment Retention and Advancement Project: Paths to Advancement for Single Parents

Between 2000 and 2003, the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project identified and implemented a diverse set of innovative models designed to promote employment stability and wage or earnings progression among low-income individuals, mostly current or former welfare recipients. The project's goal was to determine which strategies could help low-wage workers stay employed and advance over time--and which strategies seem not to work. Over a dozen different ERA program models have now been evaluated using experimental, random assignment research designs, and three of the programs increased single parents' employment and earnings. This report augments the ERA project's experimental findings by examining the work, education, and training experiences of single parents targeted by the studied programs. Although the analysis is descriptive only and cannot be used to identify the exact causes of advancement, examining the characteristics of single parents who advance and the pathways by which they do so can inform the design of the next generation of retention and advancement programs. Key findings include: (1) Few parents advanced over time, and most of the remaining parents either spent long periods out of work or lost ground; (2) Parents who advanced worked more stably over the period than other parents; (3) Parents who did not work during Year 3 had very high rates of employment instability; (4) In terms of demographic characteristics and experiences, parents who worked but had not advanced were between these two extremes (that is, between parents who advanced and those who did not work in Year 3); and (5) Job changing is an important route to advancement. Supplementary Tables are appended. (Contains 24 tables, 5 figures and 45 footnotes.) [For "The Employment Retention and Advancement Project: Paths to Advancement for Single Parents. Executive Summary," see ED517020.]