The Jobs to Careers Evaluation Program at UNC evaluates grantee demonstration projects participating in the Jobs to Careers: Promoting Work-Based Learning for Quality Care program, a national initiative of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in collaboration with the Hitachi Foundation. The foundations support partnerships of employers and educational institutions to advance and reward the skill and career development of frontline workers. The evaluation program is a joint project for the UNC Institute on Aging (IOA) and the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. The program is housed at the IOA as part of the Program on the Care of the Aging.
The RWJ Jobs to Careers program is designed to establish systems that train, develop, reward, and advance current frontline health and health care workers to improve the quality of care and ensure the quality of services provided to patients and communities. These frontline workers—4.7 million of them in the United States—provide their patients and clients with preventive and early intervention services, chronic illness management strategies, and long-term and post-hospitalization rehabilitative care.
Yet despite their critical and growing responsibilities, few earn enough to support a family, and their lack of access to training and credentials compounds the limits on their opportunities to advance. These jobs are characterized by heavy workloads, low pay, and few benefits. Job turnover tends to be high, and efforts to improve this work by creating more stable and better-prepared workforce are crucial as our health care system faces rising demand from an aging population.
The seventeen Jobs to Careers demonstration sites are broad-based local partnerships comprised of health or health care employers, educational institutions, and other community organizations. The partnerships are part of an overall effort to develop and redesign systems that support and institutionalize learning and career advancement for frontline workers test new models of work-based learning.
The UNC evaluation project analyzes the implementation of these projects, as well as their outcomes. The team works with grantee sites nationally to assess program effectiveness using a case study methodology, which allows for an in-depth examination of learning programs in the context of individual participants and leaders, local sites and partnerships, and local labor markets. The UNC team approach is centered in the life course perspective, which seeks to understand lives in the context of the complex set of factors that influence them, such as time and place, linked lives, social structures, and individual actions and decisions.
