Employer Engagement Strategies in the Clean Energy Sector and Job Seeker Outcomes

Frequently Asked Questions 

What is this project? 

This project examines training providers’ relationships with employers in the clean energy sector and how these might affect workers’ employment outcomes — such as getting a job, changing careers, or increasing wages. 

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) and MEF Associates, a research and evaluation organization, are conducting this work as part of the Sector Training Evidence-Building Project (STEP), a national initiative focused on understanding what makes workforce training programs most effective within specific sectors. 

How does my organization factor in? 

We are bringing together training providers from across the country to share experiences and insights about the clean energy sector. IREC identified your organization as a strong fit for this opportunity based on the important work you do training workers in the clean energy sector.  

Providers like yours are essential for helping us understand how different training approaches and employer partnerships operate in practice. 

This document provides more information about the project and answers to common questions we have heard from other training providers. 

What does participation look like?  

We are inviting training providers across the country to share structured information about their programs and employer relationships so we can learn what types of engagement are associated with better worker outcomes. 

Your organization’s participation would involve two components:  

  1. A 1-hour phone conversation with MEF staff to discuss your relationships with clean energy employers. This might include questions about whether employers contribute to the design or curriculum of your training programs, how often you are in contact with employers, and which engagement activities you find most helpful or effective.  
  2. Share job market data about students in your training programs. This includes data such as employment status and wages before and after training, whether students are employed in the clean energy sector, and whether they experienced a raise or job change as a result of the training.  

We collect data on our students but I’m not sure I can share it. 

We understand data sharing requires careful consideration, and protecting student privacy is a priority. We do not need names or personally identifying information. 

MEF can work with your organization to establish a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) that clearly outlines: 

  • What data will be shared  
  • Who can access it  
  • How it is protected and  
  • When and how it is securely destroyed

We do not need the names or identifying information of individual students. We are happy for de-identified data that has been stripped of personal identifiers, or data that is already aggregated by your organization. For example, as overall employment rates or average wages for program participants. 

How will the data be used? 

We combine information across providers to understand how different types of employer partnerships relate to worker outcomes. 

  • Building employer engagement profiles. We will use information from the phone conversations to understand how training providers engage with employers. For example, we may identify that some providers maintain a small number of close partnerships while others work with a broader network of employers in a more limited capacity.  
  • Comparing worker outcomes across engagement profiles. We will then compare job market outcomes for workers across these different engagement profiles. For example, we might explore whether certain profiles of employer engagement are associates with differences in employment or wages. We will also examine specific engagement mechanisms such as whether including local employers in curriculum design is associated with better worker outcomes.  

When we write up the findings of our project, we will talk about our results in general. If your organization agrees, we will include your organization’s name in a list of contributors to the work. We will never identify any of your organization’s data in the report.  

How do I share the data with MEF? 

In terms of data sharing, we are hoping to make the process as low burden as possible. Specifically, we are requesting data that is aggregated, rather than at the individual level. For example, the characteristics and outcomes should be averages or percentages. You should not share data on each individual person. That means you can provide us overall summary statistics across these programs. This usually assuages program’s concerns in sharing data as it is less sensitive and does not include any individual information, even in a deidentified sense. However, if this produces undue burden for you all and you don’t have the ability to create these aggregates easily, MEF is happy to establish a secure data system where we a data analyst on our team can aggregate the data ourselves. We will then promptly destroy the individual level data, as we do not need or want it! 

We will provide a secure system for you all to upload the data and share it with MEF. This is at no cost to your organization and does not require you to make any new accounts. (We usually use Box.com for this).  

What data specifically should I provide? 

We aim to make data sharing as straightforward and low-burden as possible. We will work closely with your organization to define what data you can share and how best to structure it. We will provide a data sharing template form for your organization to enter data into.  

Timing: MEF will work with your organization to develop a timeline for sharing data. In general, we are most interested in employment outcomes measured three months (90 days) after students complete the program, though we can be flexible based on what you currently collect. 

Aggregating the data: We will work with you to define how to group your students into “cohorts.” A cohort is typically a group of students who complete the same program around the same time or who go through the same curriculum in the same geographic area during the study period. 

We ask that outcomes and characteristics be calculated across all students in the cohort (not only those who completed the program or had successful outcomes). 

What data to provide: We will provide a simple data template to guide sharing. In general, we request three types of aggregated information: 

  1. Demographic characteristics of your students 
  2. Employment outcomes after completing the program 
  3. Wages for those who are employed 

We will work with you to confirm what data you have available, and it is completely fine if you do not collect all of this information. 

Demographic information about your students: 

  • Age (average and/or distribution across age groups) 
  • Gender (% by category) 
  • Race/ethnicity (% by category) 
  • Highest level of education (% by category) 
  • Employment status before the program (% employed) 
  • Average hourly wage before the program 
  • Average household income before the program 

Employment and wage outcomes (approximately three months after program completion): 

  • Employed in any job (%) 
  • Employed in the target sector (%) 
  • Average hourly wage ($) 

How will my organization benefit from participation? 

We offer a modest honorarium as a thank you for participating. With your permission, we will also acknowledge all participating organizations in project publications and presentations.  

As a product of the work, we will share concrete lessons learned about what employment engagement strategies are most effective and have the most bang for your buck.  

More broadly, your participation helps build evidence about the clean energy workforce sector and strengthens recognition of the work providers like yours are doing. The clean energy sector is an exciting, growing, sector offering family-sustaining career opportunities. Building research about this workforce in this field is important to raising the visibility of the field, and the important work that providers like you are doing, and how it can be supported.   

How will data be stored and safeguarded? 

All data will be kept confidential and stored securely on MEF’s protected servers. Only authorized project staff will have access. 

We use secure file transfer methods, multi-factor authentication, and strict access controls. 

The study is reviewed by an independent Institutional Review Board (IRB), an ethics committee that ensures research protects participants and minimizes risk. 

Data will only be used for this research and will not be shared outside the research team. 

Are you evaluating the effectiveness of our specific training program? 

No. We are not evaluating individual training providers or programs. Instead, we are studying how different types of employer partnerships relate to worker outcomes across many programs combined. 

We do not report results about any specific organization, and no individual provider’s data will be identified. 

 

 

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If you have any questions that are not addressed in the FAQ, please reach out to the Project Director Helena Wippick (Helena.Wippick@mefassociates.com).