RESEA: Building Evidence for Reemployment Services

Highlights

There is a need for more evidence-based reemployment service strategies.
We developed evidence standards options, evidence-building approaches, and evaluation technical assistance
The result is more evaluations across the nation to produce evidence of effective interventions

The Challenge

To improve the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) program’s success in helping Unemployment Insurance claimants return to work more quickly, Congress introduced requirements that RESEA programs be supported by evidence of effectiveness. To satisfy that requirement, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) must set standards for intervention effectiveness and support state efforts to conduct evaluations that can produce high quality evidence of effectiveness and support program improvement.

The Approach

The project consists of several tasks. We scanned intervention rating approaches used elsewhere and developed options for synthesizing evidence to rate RESEA intervention effectiveness. We reviewed available evidence and conducted an implementation study of states’ current RESEA programs to help identify research gaps. We developed options for building evidence to fill those gaps. Finally, we are developing a large suite of general evaluation technical assistance (TA) products (e.g., webinars, a toolkit) and are providing customized one-on-one TA to states.

The Results

DOL published evidence standards based on options that we presented. The more than a dozen (and counting) technical assistance webinars that we have conducted have been attended, in total, by thousands of state and local staff members. According to the RESEA Plans that states submit to DOL, nearly all states are developing or implementing plans to conduct evaluations.

RESEA Evaluation and Evidence Resources

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