Do People Ever Change? Finding A Job, Keeping It

In the early 1980s, my community job training group had an antique brass train bell, which we rang each time a job placement was achieved. Yet even as we celebrated, we knew the job placement was fragile, frequently to be lost in a matter of months or sooner.

Sometimes the jobs were lost due to inability to master skills. Far more often the job loss was tied to mindset and behavior. The mindset was a mix of hopelessness, anger and anxiety that sapped motivation and led to absenteeism and disputes with coworkers and supervisors. Forty-five years later, it is still behaviors, rather than lack of skills, that most commonly undermine job retention among the groups targeted by America’s workforce system—long term welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out of school youth, persons in recovery.

Joe Bankman is a professor at Stanford Law School and practicing psychologist. For the past two years he has been meeting with job training groups testing behavioral interventions for “high risk” youth, ex-offenders and welfare recipients. Chief among these interventions are forms of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), tailored to the groups’ job placement and retention goals.

As Bankman notes, none of the CBT interventions is a miracle cure and the longer term employment impacts remain to be seen. But a number of these interventions—at Roca, Fortune Society, READI Chicago, and the Center for Employment Opportunities –are showing reduced rates of arrest, recidivism, and government benefit receipt. They are grounded, common sense approaches, low cost and scalable.

Further, like all of the better behavioral interventions for youth and adults on the margins, the CBT interventions aim at building confidence, individual responsibility and agency. They urge participants to reject victimhood and resignation.