Research & Analytics Core Capabilities

Advising and Consulting for Research and Evaluation Design

Jobs for the Future (JFF) provides advisement and consultation services to inform metric development, data collection strategies, and research and evaluation design. For example, we have:

• Helped those in the field hone their questions so they are better able to understand their desired impact
• Advised on the development of survey items and data collection strategies to ensure greater validity and confidence in findings
• Designed evaluation and research scopes of work to accompany grants and business proposals

Examples of Our Work

Goldman Sachs – Evaluation Consulting: Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses effort was amplified by the infusion of fellows recruited from local community college programs into small businesses that were part of the Goldman Sachs initiative. Working with JFFLabs Corporate team, JFF’s research team provided feedback on impact measure design and data collection strategies. This advisement fed directly into the work of the project’s formal evaluators at Babson College.

Evaluation Services

JFF works with employers, foundations, and other partners in the field to provide insights that shed light on the development, implementation, and impact of programs and policies that support inclusive and equitable economic advancement. We have:

• Examined the effectiveness of apprenticeships affiliated with technology boot camps for female, Black, and Latinx learner-workers
• Provided insights for improvement, learning, and decision-making for corporate partners seeking to increase reskilling efforts for technology on-ramps

Research to Advance the Field

JFF offers a unique perspective and broad field networks to our research partners as we deepen the field’s understanding of how to help various populations achieve their educational and economic goals. We have:

• Conducted literature reviews, landscape analyses, and policy scans to shed light on current practices and policies related to secondary education, post-secondary education, adult education, workforce development, and industry employer trends
• Conducted studies that leveraged a range of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches and designs to understand effectiveness, quality, and variation in training efforts and work-based learning outcomes for ethnically and racially diverse groups of education and workforce interventions
• Provided leadership to research networks that seek to link field practitioners with researchers to leverage new findings to inform and improve practice
• Amplified and built upon existing metrics that capture key outcomes related to workforce education and job placement

Tools, Frameworks, and Analytical Supports

JFF offers and continues to build a range of theoretically grounded and practice-informed resources to aid learning, sense-making, and decision execution. For example, we have:

• Created a framework to assess equity of state-level education and workforce policies and to assess scaling of interventions in postsecondary settings
• Developed data collection tools for use across program settings to understand impact at an initiative level
• Developed multiple interactive dashboards to understand and inform program efforts in real-time
• Secured funding to create a theory and practice-based index to support digital job planning and improvement efforts in regions