Wagner-Peyser Act

Claimants may be selected to attend the mandatory PREP program if they have been profiled as most likely to exhaust benefits prior to returning to work. Selection to attend a PREP appointment will provide the claimant with an orientation of the career center to include services available, as well as an initial assessment service to help determine additional need. With the introduction of the RESEA program, LWDBs in Florida may elect to participate in this program in lieu of the PREP program. For those LWDBs who elect to participate in the RESEA program, claimants selected for reemployment services in these areas will receive an intensive one–on–one session with career center staff. During the one–on–one session, claimants will receive an orientation, initial assessment, specific labor market information, development of an employability plan and be scheduled for additional reemployment services. Claimants who are not profiled and scheduled to attend PREP or RESEA will be offered the full array of WP career services depending on the claimant’s request and other determined need. Career services may be scheduled in the management information system requiring the claimant to fulfill their obligation to actively pursue employment. Failure to comply with scheduled services may be communicated to the RA program for referral to an adjudicator for fact finding to be conducted.

Claimants are one of the priority populations supported by Florida’s WP funds. Florida’s automated processes allow RA claimants to receive reemployment services quickly and seamlessly. Upon filing an initial claim in the RA reporting system, various data points are collected from the claimant’s application and transmitted into EFM to create a basic WP application. The claimant is sent with an introductory welcome message that also provides helpful resources regarding the services they may utilize in the system to look for work. On a weekly basis, characteristics collected from the RA claims application (including but not limited to the number of jobs the claimant had over a certain period; the claimant’s job tenure and wages; the industry from which the claimant was laid off, as well as the time of year the layoff occurred; the availability of comparable jobs in the area, etc.) is processed through a regression model to derive a profiling coefficient. The coefficient value determines the claimants’ likelihood of exhausting RA benefits prior to returning to work and is used to determine which type of mandatory reemployment program the claimant will be assigned to attend. Upon assignment of the coefficient, the claimant is transmitted into a pool that will be used to assign them to the state’s Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS) program, coined PREP in Florida, or the RESEA program. This automated pool collection and event assignment typically occurs every Saturday. Every Monday, LWDB staff are responsible for viewing the number of claimants in their respective pools and creating events to appropriately accommodate as many claimants as possible. LWDBs operate PREP or RESEA, but never both programs simultaneously. Those LWDBs operating the RESEA program set goals of the number of claimants they will schedule and complete in a given year. These goals are used to determine how many claimants they will schedule each week from their respective pools. LWDBs operating the PREP program typically schedule their full pool, but do not have predetermined numbers to complete. Every Monday night, based on the number of claimants each LWDB determines to schedule, the automated process uses those numbers to populate events. Once events are populated, EFM automatically generates letters for the LWDB to send to the claimant. These letters are printed by staff and mailed to the claimant at least two weeks in advance of their scheduled appointment.