A practical evaluation plan for measuring earning power in workforce programs

Many organizations avoid measuring what actually matters because they’ve been taught meaningful evaluation requires a research team, a grant, and institutional permission. Workforce programs have defaulted to outputs—wages, placement, retention. Yet these metrics tell us how busy we’ve been rather than how effective we’ve been.

This session introduces Earning Power—a practical, emerging metric that assesses an individual’s capacity to navigate and advance within an economy shaped by exclusion. We have found that earning power can be measured during program participation, without costly longitudinal tracking.
Participants will define Earning Power for their context and leave with a ready-to-use tool to begin measuring it immediately.