Transitional employment and re-entry support

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute has developed an indicator framework to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in transitional employment and re-entry support. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Employment opportunities: Ratio of pay on an average job to the cost of living. These data are available from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

• Access to jobs paying a living wage: Employment-to-population ratio for adults ages 25 to 54. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics.

• Opportunities for income: Household income at 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Financial security: Share of households with debt in collections. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Debt in America website.

• Just policing: Number of juveniles arrested per 100,000. High rates of juvenile arrests provide a strong indicator of overall system involvement and over-policing. These data are available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Data Explorer.

• Consider different implementation models: Transitional employment program models vary considerably depending on target population, funding, and organizational capacity. Some models provide phased implementation of services, from training and education to placement in transitional and then unsubsidized employment. Other models provide services such as cognitive behavioral therapy to address behavioral health issues. Some programs also offer in-house transitional job opportunities with immediate compensation, building work habits before placement elsewhere. For full-time placement, programs connect participants with a cultivated network of employers, many of which have experience hiring from transitional programs.

• Use incentives: Some individuals may be hesitant to engage with transitional employment programs, making financial incentives an important tool to enhance retention. Although this can increase program costs, stipends can be critical in supporting participants to meet basic expenses while in the program. Providing payment for attending training or coaching sessions or offering incentives tied to milestones, such as earning a diploma or credential, can also build confidence, sustain motivation, and improve program outcomes.

• Focus on foundational skills: Effective transitional employment strategies should prioritize building foundational skills needed for long-term job and career development. Depending on an individual’s needs, these strategies may include providing access to and covering costs for vocational programs that lead to a license or certificate, completion of educational credentials such as a high school diploma, and job-readiness training. Training can cover interviewing skills, workplace professionalism, communication, and stress management—skills that help individuals both secure employment and succeed throughout their careers.

• Offer ongoing support: Programs should continue to provide support and services after transitional job placement and when a participant has secured a permanent, unsubsidized position. This can include additional coaching, skills training, and career development counseling as participants encounter issues in the workplace, which is especially important for those with little prior work experience. Often, programs make these services available for up to one year after the initial placement and also allow individuals to return to transitional employment if they decide to seek a new position.

• Emphasize benchmarks and accountability: To underscore the importance of participant accountability, many transitional employment programs, especially those focused more on cognitive behavior change, establish benchmarks for individuals to achieve as they progress through the program. These benchmarks are structured to sustain behavioral change and develop participants’ readiness for employment and participation in the workplace. During this process, individuals are consistently evaluated as they advance through skills training to transitional employment and permanent job placement.

• Develop a robust referral pipeline: To ensure that programs reach those most in need, build strong ties to agencies and organizations associated with the target populations. These can include public housing resident associations, social service agencies, youth programs, and faith-based organizations. If a program is focused on reducing violence and gang membership, street outreach teams in high-violence neighborhoods can help identify high-risk individuals who may benefit from such services. Programs targeting individuals returning from incarceration can establish links with the criminal justice system, Departments of Corrections, parole officers, and the local police department.

• Collaborate with employers: A collaborative relationship with employers allows programs to advocate for better wages and benefits for workers and to promote the hiring of individuals from underrepresented populations. Programs can leverage these relationships to reduce bias against certain groups (like individuals returning from incarceration), build trust and credibility with businesses, and encourage employers to convert more transitional jobs into permanent positions.

• Participants: Those seeking employment bring lived experience that can guide program design. Designing around participant needs and establishing strategies to prepare them for transitional and permanent job placement will likely enhance program effectiveness.

• Employers: Companies, nonprofits, and public sector agencies are the main points of entry into the labor market for permanent jobs. Close collaboration between employers and transitional employment programs can create smoother onboarding and ongoing job success for participants. Employers can also become champions of transitional employment programs and influence other potential employers to participate.

• Government officials: City, county, and state leaders can collaborate with organizations that run transitional employment programs and offer job placement in the public sector. They can also provide a portion of the funding for their operations. Their advocacy for program continuity and expansion is also critical for long-term stability.

• Philanthropies: The philanthropic community often provides funding for transitional employment programs, facilitates connections with private-sector employers, and promotes innovative employment models to reduce stigma for underrepresented groups, such as individuals with disabilities or criminal records.

• Crew supervisors and program staff: Many programs that provide transitional jobs for participants rely on crew supervisors to organize and supervise work teams, often in areas such as landscaping, urban forestry, and sustainability. Supervisors and program staff, many with similar lived experiences as participants, play a critical role in motivating individuals, teaching workplace skills, helping with stress management, and building understanding of other workplace expectations.

• Phased implementation: Organizations typically roll out programs in stages, starting with transitional jobs and gradually building capacity before adding unsubsidized employment placements. As transitional jobs programs are developed, program leaders should ensure that opportunities offer structured, meaningful work experiences that are aligned with local labor and market demand. Coaching and career planning should also be embedded to prepare individuals for the move to unsubsidized employment.

• Seek program teams with diverse backgrounds: Transitional employment programs are most effective when they include staff from a variety of backgrounds and profiles. This should include hiring individuals with similar lived experiences to participants, which helps build trust and deepen empathy. Other essential early hires are workforce development professionals who possess the knowledge and expertise to prepare participants to enter the workforce with the ability to navigate a range of issues and responsibilities.

• Build employer partnerships: Program success depends on developing strong, trusted relationships with a wide range of employers who can serve as a reliable source of permanent jobs. Programs often use targeted outreach and marketing strategies to establish a broad referral network of potential employers, emphasizing the skills, credentials, and experience participants can bring to the job.

• Provide ongoing support: To promote participant success in unsubsidized positions, programs should establish clear guidelines with employers regarding job duties, supervision, and performance evaluation. Programs and employers should also coordinate ongoing coaching, training, and education to help individuals address workplace challenges or transition into another role with the employer.

• Leverage data: Programs should be built to ensure consistent data collection and analysis. Recruitment, job training, coaching, placement, and other program activities should be subject to regular evaluation. Programs should then use leverage insights to improve processes, better match participants with jobs, and refine services. Some programs also partner with universities, nonprofits, or criminal justice agencies to strengthen data sharing and analytical capacity.
  

• Outreach: Program managers should collect data on the demographics of potential participants to ensure outreach efforts reach populations in need. Key data points include the number of individuals approached and those served, as well as their background, experience, income level, population group, and educational attainment. Analyzing these metrics helps managers identify barriers to participation, ensuring that recruitment strategies effectively reach the intended populations.

• Employer needs: Programs should track which skills employers need most and monitor shifts in labor market demand to keep training current.

• Training: To adequately prepare participants for placement, Programs should assess participants’ baseline skill levels and track attendance across training, coaching, and vocational sessions. Progress through curricula should be monitored to determine employment readiness. This data should include participation in soft skills training, such as mock interview participation, job fair attendance, and counseling and therapy sessions.

• Transitional employment: Once placed in transitional jobs, programs must track data on the participants’ attendance, performance, and overall success rate to determine whether they require additional training or coaching to succeed in an unsubsidized position.

• Unsubsidized employment: After an individual is placed in unsubsidized work, programs should collect information on how long they are employed and their performance in that job. Monitoring specific outcomes— such as whether participants are terminated, resign, or advance in a position—helps identify the primary challenges participants face in the workplace and can influence the refinement of programming.

• Compensation: Wages and the job-related benefits that individuals receive are critical to understanding job satisfaction, retention, and advancement. It is important to track participants’ wages and their access to benefits like health insurance.

• Violence disruption: Transitional employment programs that focus on disrupting violence require data on participants served, counseling and trauma-related therapeutic services offered, and successful job placement rates upon program completion. Programs also need to know about the impact of wraparound services, such as housing and educational support. To evaluate the impact on violence reduction, these programs require data on changes in recidivism, engagement in violence, and the number of individual interactions with the criminal justice system.