WIOA State Plan Common Elements

Under WIOA Title II, the State of Vermont has met Federal performance targets for the past two years. This improvement in outcomes for students as demonstrated through increases in Educational Functioning Levels (EFLs) is a direct result of adherence to statute and policy. The chart below shows the percentage of Measurable Skill Gains (MSG) reported to the U.S. Department of Education. The chart below demonstrates that each AEL provider has also made significant increases in MSGs in the past three program years.

The DVR Consumer Experience Survey is conducted every three years to determine consumers’ overall satisfaction with the program. The survey is conducted by a third-party research firm, Market Decisions Research (MDR), who have an extensive background in working with other VR agencies nationwide.

Seven hundred consumers were contacted to provide information for our 2018 survey. The results were outstanding, and found that of the consumers surveyed:

• 81% reported they were satisfied or very satisfied with DVR.
• 96% said they would recommend that their friends or family members seek help from DVR.
• 92% of consumers reported they are satisfied with their experience working with DVR staff and DVR counselors; this statistic has risen two percent from our previous survey in 2016.

An area where DVR has enjoyed consistently high rates of satisfaction is in consumers feeling that they were treated by DVR staff with dignity and respect. In the 2018 survey, 98% of consumers reported feeling that they were treated by DVR staff with dignity and respect. The largest improvement in customer experience was seen in the ability of consumers to communicate with their DVR counselors. In 2016, 88% of consumers were satisfied with their ability to contact their counselor; in 2018 this percentage has risen to 91%, an all-time high for the agency. 

The Market Decisions Research survey also included for the first time, measures of satisfaction for youth in transition. 97% of youth reported that they found working with a transition counselor helpful. Only 11% reported having problems working with their DVR transition counselor. To get more qualitative data, DVR is contracting with Market Decisions Research to conduct focus groups with youth in early 2020. We hope data from the focus groups will help inform how we provide services for students and youth going forward. 

The VDOL is responsible for working with one-stop partners to ensure that services provided are both physically and programmatically accessible. As a condition of the SWDB’s 2019 recertification of the Burlington AJC, the SWDB policy committee directed the VDOL to make and report further progress on several key areas. Outlined below are the SWDB’s requests and a summary of the progress updates provided.  

1. The One-Stop operator and required partners shall collaborate with partners including the Vermont Division of Vocational Rehabilitation and the Vermont Assistive Technology Program and Advisory Council to continue to improve the physical and programmatic accessibility of the One-Stop.

VDOL has been working with VR, the Vermont Assistive Technology Program (AT), and DBVI to make the Burlington AJC fully accessible to individuals with disabilities. While there are tools for accessibility already in the One-Stop, VDOL is pursuing replacements and upgrades. Plans for improvements to physical and programmatic accessibility are as follows:

A. The interior and exterior of the building have been assessed for physical accessibility, with several recommendations for improvement including adding an additional handicapped parking space with clear designation that it is for one-stop customers and updating braille signage on elevators and restroom doors, etc.

B. Working with experts in accessibility from VR, DBVI and the AT program, VDOL staff have identified several technologies that would make the One-Stop more accessible to individuals with disabilities. By creating two distinct accessible workstations, one focused on accessibility for Blind and Visually Impaired customers, and the other equipped with tools for individuals with hearing impairments, VDOL is committed to making programs and services accessible to ALL Vermonters. VDOL will gather feedback from users and, with guidance from Assistive Technology specialists, work to ensure that equipment and software are continuously upgraded.

C. Creating plans to address some facility improvements, like move reception desk to front of the Resource Room to create a more welcoming atmosphere-greet customers at the door, new paint and carpeting in common areas, upgraded tables and chairs, elevator painting, replace carpet, create private office spaces on top floor for prospective new partners, upgrading upstairs meeting space, including new induction loop for hearing impaired, adding safety stripes to stairs for visually impaired, and providing digital displays of information.

D. Establish a customer feedback mechanism to get “real-time” feedback on services.

2. The Committee recognizes the efforts of all One-Stop required and non-required partners to train and cross-train staff to share program/service information and best practices, however, the Committee understands that these trainings and cross-trainings are necessary on an ongoing, cyclical basis. The One-Stop operator and required and non-required partners shall develop and implement a plan to ensure that trainings and cross trainings are scheduled on a cyclical basis to ensure that all staff regularly receive up-to-date information.

Cross-training of one-stop staff and community partners has begun and is described in more detail earlier in this plan.  

3. The Committee recognizes the work of the One-Stop operator and required partners to complete its memorandum of understanding (MOU) last year. Though this is an important step, the Committee found that the co-location of required partners remains only partially implemented due to several barriers as indicated by One-Stop leadership. The One-Stop operator and required partners shall convene to discuss co-location, including:

•        The necessity and feasibility of physical colocation

•        The potential benefits of virtual colocation

•        The short-term and long-term steps to implement co-location

Co-locating workforce service providers at 63 Pearl Street, Burlington has been a longstanding challenge. The building itself is co-owned by the federal government and the VDOL and is thus not managed like other state buildings. VDOL manages all aspects of the facility and its operation. 

WIOA requires all required one-stop partners to be (physically or virtually) co-located in the state’s comprehensive one-stop AJC (Vermont’s only comprehensive center is in Burlington). While Vermont does indeed meet this collocation requirement, the lack of substantial physical collocation is seen by some as a missed opportunity to further integrate delivery of all employment and training focused services. VDOL agrees that promoting and facilitating physical co-location of some programs will improve outcomes for customers. However, for roughly half of the required One-Stop partners, co-location of their programs and services would have a significant financial and programmatic impact that is likely to outweigh the benefit of a physical move. VDOL encourages the SWDB to further explore those considerations with the partners directly if there is interest in learning more. 

Barriers to increasing collocation include: the overall condition of the facility, breaking current leases (particularly challenging in BGS leases), scarcity of personal office spaces, and parking. Advantages to collocation include: a relatively low per square foot cost, proximity to public transportation and downtown Burlington, availability of space, proximity of partners, ease in access to building oversight officers.  

Several partner programs have both an occasional presence and a full-time “virtual” presence via technology. VR is a good example. A VR counselor spends a few hours each week at the One-Stop, where they can assist any individual with a disability, often in partnership with their VDOL counterparts. In cases where a VR counselor isn’t available in person, there is a mechanism to Skype over to the Burlington VR office, where the customer can interact face-to-face with a live person at VR, arrange for an initial meeting with a counselor, or find out more about services VR can offer. Core partners have found that this “warm” handoff between programs is a best practice.

4. In order for the Committee to fulfill its charge to establish universal workforce system performance measures and identify necessary program data to be regularly collected for the purposes of maintaining a workforce program inventory, the One-Stop operator shall regularly report data and performance metrics to the Committee. As the Committee continues to develop a workforce performance "dashboard" by which it may evaluate the effectiveness of the system as a whole, it may choose to include some or all of the reported One-Stop performance data as a metric.

All performance data for the One-stop system is captured in Vermont Job Link and has been made readily available to the committee. 

5. The One-Stop operator shall develop and implement an improved mechanism for collecting client feedback. This feedback shall inform the continuous improvement of the One-Stop and shall be reported to the Committee on a regular basis.

The VDOL is currently exploring several options for collecting customer feedback, ranging from real-time feedback “buttons” a person could select after receiving services, written customer feedback cards, to online surveys of customers to get more detail on their experiences. One initial tool VDOL is exploring to bring a basic level of customer feedback into the one-stop is the commercially available “happy-or-not” survey tool.