VA VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION AND EMPLOYMENT: Further Performance and Workload Management…

“Veterans with disabilities face special challenges to finding employment—resulting, for example, from the veterans’ physical or mental health, or negative attitudes or stereotypes on the part of some employers. [The] VA ’s VR&E [Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment] program aims to help veterans with disabilities obtain and maintain suitable employment—compatible with their disabilities—through services such as training and job search assistance. The VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011 directed GAO [the Government Accountability Office] to review the program. GAO examined (1) the outcomes for veterans seeking employment through the program, and (2) the progress [the] VA has made in addressing critical management issues. GAO reviewed relevant laws, regulations, and guidance as well as recent studies; reviewed various program management criteria; analyzed VA administrative data on veterans who entered the program between fiscal years 2003 and 2012; interviewed staff at the VA central office and 8 regional offices; interviewed a random but non-generalizable sample of 17 program participants; and analyzed data from a VA survey of participants” (p.1). (Abstractor: Author)

Full Publication Title: VA VOCATIONAL  REHABILITATION AND EMPLOYMENT: Further Performance and Workload Management Improvements Are Needed

Recommendations included: • “In any revised set of national and regional performance measures for the VR&E program, include measures of (a) the proportion of program participants successfully rehabilitated into employment, and (b) the proportion of participants who obtain other benefits from VR&E services” (p.35). • “Develop new measures of long-term employment that go beyond the minimum 60 days of post-placement monitoring that is currently required. In developing measures, consider the feasibility of using results from planned post-closure surveys of veterans as a data source” (p. 35). • “Consistent with generally accepted survey practices and as warranted by survey response rates, conduct nonresponse analysis of the results of VA’s ongoing Voice of the Veteran customer satisfaction surveys” (p. 35). • “In revisiting VA’s formula for allocating VR&E staff among the regional offices, (a) assess the inclusion of factors related to regional office performance and, if warranted, remove them from the formula, and (b) assess the exclusion of any factor related to the number of educational counseling cases in each regional office and, if warranted, add such a factor” (p.35). • “Collect information on the regional offices’ approaches for managing their VR&E workloads, assess the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches, and use the results of this assessment to provide guidance to the offices on potential best practices or options to consider” (p.35–36). • “Provide additional training to all individual VRCs [vocation rehabilitation counselors] on job placement strategies and workplace accommodations, potentially as part of the effort to develop a competency-based training approach” (p.36). (Abstractor: Author)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2014
• Author(s): No individual author identified.
• Organizational Author(s): United States Government Accountability Office
• Funding Source: Veterans Opportunity to Work to Hire Heroes Act of 2011
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Damon Jones
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies