This qualitative phenomenological study examined the occupational downgrading experiences of six adult immigrants. Occupational downgrading happens when an individual's occupation post immigration does not match his or her education credentials and previous professional experiences. The goal is to make sense of the participants' narratives through…

Military spouses face employment obstacles such as relocations, leading to un- or underemployment. The Department of Defense (DoD) proposed three best practice guidelines for transfer of licenses for military spouses. In this study, we (a) reviewed state legislation on military spouse licensure portability and identified how states addressed DoD…

With rising job vacancies and a workforce and society that are aging, the United States already has a reservoir of human capital that is not fully tapped: The millions of U.S.-born and immigrant college graduates who are in jobs requiring no more than a high school credential or who are unemployed. This human capital, if well leveraged, could…

The Office of Workforce Development (OWD) in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, implemented Career Pathways, an innovative program designed to increase the local talent pool and help lower-skilled, unemployed, and underemployed individuals train for work in growing fields. RAND Corporation researchers evaluated…

Lower-skilled workers in the United States face a shrinking pool of employment opportunities. To combat this, the city of New Orleans' Office of Workforce Development (OWD) developed a job training program with a grant, awarded in 2014, from the U.S. Department of Labor Workforce Innovation Fund. The program, Career Pathways, was designed to help…

Competency-based education (CBE) is a rapidly growing movement of postsecondary and K-12 programs that allow learners to move ahead based on what they know and can do, rather than time spent in class. At the postsecondary level, CBE could be a pathway that helps many thousands of learners move from poverty to prosperity. This paper considers how…

With continued support and increasing interest in problems of deafness and services for deaf people, the future rehabilitation outlook appears favorable in overcoming the problem of underemployment of deaf workers. (EA)

Although many recent reports on the United States educational system urge increased investment in education to prepare students for the jobs of a high-tech future, a more immediate problem is that of the large proportion of the labor force which is currently "overeducated" or "underemployed." (JBM)

Females who were poor outnumbered males by more than four million in 1975. The 15 million females living in poverty accounted for three out of five persons (fifty-eight percent) who were poor in the United States. Advance data for 1976 indicate that more than ten million women aged sixteen and over had low incomes, and that these women accounted…

The Navajo Manpower Survey for 1967, conducted on a sample of Navajos 14 years of age and older living in the Navajo Reservation area, found high rates of unemployment and underemployment for the Navajos. Some of the other findings reported are a general lack of real work experience; an indication by 70% of the labor force members that they would…

The 4.7 million Chicanos in the Southwest in 1970 contributed significantly to the local labor supply; yet, they had substantially smaller incomes and greater unemployment than area Anglos. Although Chicanos have moved steadily from unskilled to skilled labor occupations and have entered white collar occupations, they continue to be employed in…