The Effects of Customer Choice: First Findings from the Individual Training Account Experiment

“The Individual Training Account (ITA) experiment tested three approaches to the administration of training vouchers, or ITAs, for customers of Workforce Investment Act (WIA) programs. The first approach (Approach 1) was a highly structured approach in which customers could receive generous, customized ITA awards but were directed to training expected to yield a high return on the investment and in which counselors could reject customers’ training selections. At the other end of the spectrum, Approach 3 was a ‘true voucher’ approach in which customers were awarded a modest-value, fixed ITA and allowed to opt out of most counseling if they so desired. In the middle of spectrum, the experiment tested Approach 2, which resembled the policies that workforce agencies were likely to adopt without experiment. Customers assigned to this approach were awarded the same fixed ITA as under Approach 3 and were required to participate in counseling as they made their training decisions. This report presents preliminary findings from the evaluation for the ITA experiment” (p.xv).

“ITAs are offered to customers under all the tested approaches and there is no control group that is denied access to training, the ITA experiment cannot assess the overall effectiveness of offering ITAs. Instead, it examines the effects of different approaches to offering ITAs” (p. xviii).

(Abstractor: Author)

Full Publication Title: The Effects of Customer Choice: First Findings from the Individual Training Account Experiment Final Interim Report

“In this report, we examined the impact of the three approaches on some intermediate outcomes, including customers’ participation in counseling, participation in training, and training choices, as well as sites’ training expenditures. Our analysis led to the following conclusions” (p.xx). • “When counseling is voluntary, customers rarely request it.” (p.xx). Under Approach 3, “only a small proportion of customers requested it. This was equally true for adults and dislocated workers and did not vary much across sites” (p.xx). • “Counseling requirements discourage ITA-funded training. Customers under Approach 3 were significantly most likely to receive an ITA than customers under Approach 2” (p.xxi). • “Rates of ITA-funded training were similar under Approaches 1 and 2” (p.xxi). • “Site expenditures on training were highest under Approaches 1 and lowest under Approach 2. The approaches were designed so that the sites could spend the same total amount on training under each approach.…Counselors were not very effective in controlling training expenditures, however. Site expenditures on training per customer were about 70 percent higher under Approach 1 than under Approach 2” (p. xxii). • Authors found some small differences across three approaches: “(1) the occupation for which training was designed, (2) the type of training provider, and (3) the duration of training” (p.xxiii). (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2004
• Author(s): Perez-Johnson, Irma; McConnell, Sheena; Decker, Paul; Bellotti, Jeanne, et al.
• Organizational Author(s): Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.
• Funding Source: U.S. Department of Labor
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Melissa Mack
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies