In the early 1980s, my community job training group had an antique brass train bell, which we rang each time a job placement was achieved. Yet even as we celebrated, we knew the job placement was fragile, frequently to be lost in a matter of months or sooner.
Sometimes the jobs were lost due to inability to master skills. Far more often the job loss was tied to mindset and behavior. The mindset was a mix of hopelessness, anger and anxiety that sapped motivation and led to absenteeism and disputes with coworkers and supervisors. Forty-five years later, it is still behaviors, rather than lack of skills, that most commonly undermine job retention among the groups targeted by America’s workforce system—long term welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out of school youth, persons in recovery.
Joe Bankman is a professor at Stanford Law School and practicing psychologist. For the past two years he has been meeting with job training groups testing behavioral interventions for “high risk” youth, ex-offenders and welfare recipients. Chief among these interventions are forms of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), tailored to the groups’ job placement and retention goals.
As Bankman notes, none of the CBT interventions is a miracle cure and the longer term employment impacts remain to be seen. But a number of these interventions—at Roca, Fortune Society, READI Chicago, and the Center for Employment Opportunities --are showing reduced rates of arrest, recidivism, and government benefit receipt. They are grounded, common sense approaches, low cost and scalable.
Further, like all of the better behavioral interventions for youth and adults on the margins, the CBT interventions aim at building confidence, individual responsibility and agency. They urge participants to reject victimhood and resignation.
John Colborn, director of Apprenticeships for America, and I met with Bankman recently. He described the promise he sees in these CBT interventions.
Roca: High Risk Youth, “Rewire CBT”
At its core, CBT is tool that helps job seekers understand that their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interconnected. Recognizing and changing unhelpful thinking patterns and feelings can redirect behavioral responses and improve workplace success. Unlike some therapies that involve an extended exploration of the past, CBT focuses on present problems and concrete goals.
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One of the groups that Bankman recently visited is Roca, which focuses on “high risk youth”, 16-24 years of age. Most of the participants have been involved in the justice system or street violence. Established in Boston 38 years ago, Roca currently has operations in Boston and Baltimore.
“It is 5:45 am and I am at a job training site run by Roca,” Bankman wrote about his recent visit to Roca in Baltimore. “I’m sitting in a semicircle with a dozen young men who are about to go to work on a city contract to pick up trash, The men are described as ‘the toughest of the toughest’ by the director job training, who adds, ‘they are the ones who shoot and get shot. The problem is not that these guys can’t do the job, it’s that they can’t get or last in the job.’”
Roca’s employment strategy is a three-year strategy mixing work experience, multi-year individual counseling, and job-related CBT. It starts with “relentless outreach”, as youth workers go into Baltimore neighborhoods to recruit. Once a participant is enrolled, the youth worker is responsible for immediate follow up if the participant fails to appear or carry out duties. Roca’s work-experience program (transitional employment) utilizes Roca-supervised crews in maintenance and cleaning projects with public entities, with the main goal of developing workplace behaviors.
Roca developed its CBT approach, termed “Rewire CBT”, with Massachusetts General Hospital, and it is an approach woven into daily work experience. The work crew supervisors and youth workers challenge participants to recognize the relation between thoughts, emotions and actions. Participants practice identifying negative thoughts triggered by situations, recognizing the emotional/physical reaction and creating a pause between the reaction and any subsequent response.
As an illustration, a participant’s supervisor might say, “You’re late again. You’re not taking this job seriously.” For someone accustomed to responding immediately to perceived disrespect, the sequence might be: (i) anger (“he’s disrespecting me”), (ii) curse at supervisor, (iii) walk off the job or be fired. Roca’s CBT intervention attempts to rewire: (i) recognize trigger, (ii) identify thought and physical reaction, (iii) pause and consider consequences, (iv) choose another response.
“The importance of recognizing negative emotions and thoughts, and pausing before reacting, is practiced throughout the work day,” Bankman explains. “The day might begin with a leader asking the question ‘How you feeling?’ A worker who says he is discouraged, or angry gets sympathy from the group, and is then asked if there is a way to reframe his situation, and/or actions he might take to improve his situation. The structure is decidedly non-hierarchical.”
During a work break that the crew takes later in the morning, Bankman is asked to speak to the group:
“It is 9:30 am. I am at a park in East Baltimore. The men I saw earlier in the semicircle at Roca have been picking up trash. I am introduced as a CBT-trained psychologist, and given the opportunity to speak. ‘You must question this sometimes,’ I say. ‘You have to get up early, work in the cold, why do this?’ The responses come quickly. ‘Stick with it” says one worker, ‘I’ve been shot, I do this to respect my live’ says another, ‘You act on values’ adds a third.”
Bankman chronicles the practice of CBT throughout the work day, and his observation at the day’s end:
“I am impressed by the responses and how they mirror the CBT goals. I use a similar protocol and am not sure my clients would give answers that show the same understanding as the Roca crew. I am also struck by how much weight the men put on values.”
Fortune Society: Justice-Involved, “Thinking for a Change”
Bankman also traveled to Fortune Society, based in Queens, New York. Fortune is one of the nation’s largest service agencies for justice involved individuals, and has offices throughout the boroughs. It operates residential units, as well as an array of education, behavioral health and individual and group counseling projects. At the center of its service approach is employment.
Fortune Society’s CBT approach differs from Roca’s. It is structured around a three week workshop for newly released individuals. The workshop is held daily from nine to three, with time before and after for individual counseling and case management. The CBT curriculum, developed by Fortune Society with the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute, has goals of workforce preparation similar to those of Roca: assist participants to understand the link between thinking and behavior, identify and manage risk factors, develop behaviors to succeed in the workplace.
In his notes on Fortune Society’s CBT, Bankman reflects: “I find this CBT curriculum to be a thoughtful one, that has been refined over time with its mix of group discussion and workbook exercises. Participants fill in their workbooks with their emotions and thoughts and how their emotions, thoughts and behavior are linked.”
Fortune Society was one of several job programs testing CBT that the research laboratory, MDRC, evaluated a few years back. MDRC researchers compared participants in these programs with a control group of individuals recently released from incarceration. Overall, the differences were not statistically significant, at least in short term employment, earnings and recidivism. But Fortune Society was the exception. Its participants did substantially better in reduced recidivism than the control group.
For the researchers, the results suggested that simply adding a CBT curriculum to employment services does not improve outcomes. The quality of the CBT curriculum and implementation matter, with Fortune Society’s outcomes reflecting the seriousness with which it takes CBT.
Do People Ever Change?
Do people ever change?
“I know that many people will think that the youth at Roca and justice involved adults at Fortune Society are only saying what they think that the administrators want to hear,” Bankman acknowledges. “But in my experience it’s not easy to get people to say things they don’t believe. If you can get someone to use their own words to frame something in a healthy way, this is going to reinforce behavioral goals. They believe it more after they hear themselves say it."
Bankman adds that “job training programs are not equipped or funded to do CBT over an extended period of time. But there is reason to think that even short term CBT strategies, that draw on the literature of CBT successes outside of the workforce field, can improve the ability of participants to find and retain jobs.”
My colleague John Colborn, a 35 year veteran of job training, and I have been on a journey over the past few years to determine how recent advances in the behavioral sciences and neurosciences might be incorporated in assisting workers on the margins. In the past two decades, the neurosciences have brought insights into the neurological drivers of behavior. We have come to believe that these insights can be translated into training programs.
“Anyone who has worked to connect people to jobs has seen how self-sabotaging behavior undermines even those with the best technical skills,” John has written. “The best skill training in the world won’t overcome a poorly-timed blow-up at the boss. But these negative behaviors that once drove job coaches to distraction, now have real tools for rewiring the job seeker.”
Additionally, John explains, “CBT comes as the workforce field now understands that these undermining behaviors are often rooted in the broader past experiences of clients. We can no longer just chalk up negative behavior to issues of culture and role modeling. Understanding the neurological basis for behavior gives us new tools to address it.”
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