Toolkit

Adding a Gender Lens to Nontraditional Jobs Training Programs

At a Glance

With this toolkit, training programs for nontraditional jobs can learn how to engage and support women and other underrepresented communities as they seek new, high-potential careers.

Published apr. 28, 2017

Areas of Work

Ensuring Equity in Advancement
Meeting Employer Needs

Topics

Sections

Overview

Section 1: Outreach and Recruitment of Women

Section 2: Assessment and Case Management

Section 3: Building Critical Job-Readiness Skills

Section 4: Training Design to Facilitate Women's Success in Apprenticeship

Section 5: How to Identify, Address, and Prevent Sexual Harassment

Section 6: Health and Safety Issues for Women in Nontraditional Jobs

This toolkit was created by Wider Opportunities for Women for the GreenWays initiative and revised by JFF as part of the Delivering the TDL Workforce initiative. Supported by the Walmart Foundation, Delivering the TDL Workforce expanded high-quality transportation, distribution, and logistics training programs in 10 regions and promoted best practices in program design and delivery, employer engagement, and workforce partnership development. GreenWays was supported by grants from the US Department of Labor through Pathways Out of Poverty and the Green Jobs Innovation Fund.

This toolkit was developed by Lauren Sugerman, Geri Scott, Matt Unrath, Deborah Kobes, and Marc S. Miller. Adaptations developed by Jessica Toglia, Dimitri Linde, Daniel West, and Tyler Nakatsu. We gratefully acknowledge Chicago Women in Trades, Nontraditional Employment for Women, and Oregon Tradeswomen, Inc for their contributions of content and photographs to presentations and materials. Thanks also to Rochelle Hickey, Micayla Boari, and Barry Hall for design.

The Department of Labor makes no guarantees, warranties, or assurances of any kind, express or implied, with respect to such information, including any information on linked sites and including, but not limited to, accuracy of the information or its completeness, timeliness, usefulness, adequacy, continued availability, or ownership. This solution is copyright by the institution that created it. Internal use, by an organization and/or personal use by an individual for noncommercial purposes, is permissible. All other uses require the prior authorization of the copyright owner.

Nontraditional jobs hold the promise of new and high-potential career paths. This could mean significant new opportunities for women and others currently underrepresented in nontraditional jobs to access well-paid, career-track jobs that provide economic security and enable them to support themselves and their families. This toolkit is designed to help training programs for nontraditional jobs break through patterns of occupational segregation.

The toolkit’s presentations, trainings, webinars, curriculum guides and modules, briefs, templates, tip sheets, and planning documents are designed to:

Help workforce development providers assess their capacity for recruiting, assessing, placing, and retaining women in nontraditional occupations
Assist training providers in developing relevant plans, processes, and curricula for recruiting and retaining women in nontraditional occupations
Provide guidelines for case management of women and matters related to the unique and wraparound and support services required for women to advance on a career path in nontraditional occupations
Assist training programs in understanding and linking to organized labor, apprenticeships, and major employers

Using the Toolkit

This toolkit is organized into six sections:

Outreach and Recruitment of Women
Assessment and Case Management for Women
Building Critical Skills of Job Readiness
Training Design to Facilitate Women’s Success in Apprenticeships
How to Identify, Address, and Prevent Sexual Harassment
Health and Safety Issues for Women in Nontraditional Jobs

These resources support the recruitment, training, and retention of women in nontraditional occupations. This toolkit can be used by program planners, managers, and frontline staff conducting outreach and assessment, training, case management, and job development to ensure that each stage of the employment process—from recruitment through retention—looks at how the workplace environment can be responsive to women of many backgrounds and how systems can be created or improved to address the barriers women face. The materials can help build the capacity of organizations to attract women to programs providing education, training, and support services targeted to women’s needs and offer assistance that helps industry partners incorporate policies and practices supporting equity and diversity. The resources also can be used to build on and strengthen existing activities, customize strategies, establish new practices and policies, and deepen effectiveness at serving all participants in an equitable manner.

Ensuring that more women are aware of and supported in entering nontraditional jobs is critical not only to achieving economic equity for women and their families but also to building a competitive workforce. To open their training and career pathways to women, programs must be attuned to and address a range of barriers women face to entering these fields—lack of awareness, sex stereotypes, limited training and work experience, perception of work, myths and stereotypes about women’s work, sex discrimination, and institutional practices directed to men.

In 2012, when the original version of this toolkit was initially released, the emerging green economy held the promise of new and high-potential career paths for women. Access to green jobs meant significant new opportunities for women to access well-paid, career-track jobs that provided economic security, enabled support for themselves and their families, and contributed directly to environmental quality.

Five years later, this remains to be true. However, while many quality green jobs, and occupations where women are not traditionally represented, such as in sectors like advanced manufacturing and transportation, these jobs are also considered nontraditional for several other underrepresented communities including but not limited to people with disabilities, Opportunity Youth, and people who identify as of color and LGBTQ. As part of recent updates of this toolkit, we recognize the use of gender-specific language, primarily the use of women as anyone who identifies as a woman. Whenever a gender-specific term is used, it should be understood as referring to all genders, unless explicitly stated.

Increasing women’s participation in a nontraditional job training program, such as manufacturing, trucking, or construction, must be approached in a strategic and targeted manner, beginning with an outreach and recruitment process that speaks directly with women. This section offers tools to create a good outreach and recruitment plan, including goals and activities.

Tool 1.1. Quiz: Gender Equity—Test Your Knowledge of Women's Economic Status and Equity

Use this quiz in an orientation or information session to prompt awareness about the need for women to have access to jobs in the traditionally higher-paid, male-dominated careers. The quiz can also be used to build the understanding and commitment of workforce development professionals for gender equity.

Accompanying the quiz is the Myths and Facts worksheet, designed to raise awareness about commonly misunderstood stereotypes.

Tool 1.1

Tool 1.2. Presentation: Recruiting Women into Nontraditional Jobs and Industries

This presentation introduces successful strategies to attract women to nontraditional job training programs and to inform them about the benefits of nontraditional occupations. The tool includes:

An overview of benefits, barriers, and myths for women in nontraditional occupations
Outreach and marketing to women: creating and delivering gender-targeted messages, including sample materials
Conducting successful information and orientation sessions to attract/inform women
Additional resources from organizations focused on connecting women to nontraditional jobs

Tool 1.2

Tool 1.3. Assessment Tool: Assessing Your Organization's Capacity for Recruiting Women

Use this assessment to evaluate your current capacity, including the number of women you serve, recruitment and assessment practices, and program goals.

Tool 1.3

Tool 1.4. Worksheet: Creating a Targeted Outreach Plan to Recruit Women

Use this worksheet as a planning tool to create your own customized strategies and messages.

Tool 1.4

Tool 1.5. Tip Sheet: Planning an Information Session—Strategies for a Successful Information or Orientation Session

Use this tool to plan a short orientation or information session for a green jobs training program.

Tool 1.5

Tool 1.6. Tip Sheet: Planning a Career Fair for Improving Women's Access to Nontraditional Jobs

Use this tip sheet to plan a career fair. It includes steps and information on marketing, partner engagement, program, and logistics. This tool walks you through the stages of planning the event.

It begins with ideas for recruiting attendees and engaging critical partners, including the workforce development system and employers, in developing or supporting the fair. Program recommendations for the event include an opening plenary and targeted workshops. The checklist also includes ideas for materials, booths, and other career fair elements.

Tool 1.6

Tool 1.7. Worksheet: Self Assessment—Considering a Career in a Nontraditional Occupation

This worksheet is intended for individuals considering your training program or current participants. It allows them to determine how well matched they are to these careers.

Tool 1.7

Tool 1.8. Worksheet: Outreach and Recruitment Workplan to Attract and Engage Women Applicants

Use this worksheet to create a blueprint and timeline for your program’s outreach and recruitment goals, activities, and measurable outcomes. This tool includes two sample workplans.

Tool 1.8

Sometimes the choices of skills, processes, or criteria used in assessments for selecting job training program participants have a negative impact on women. In addition, the impact of sex stereotypes and learned biases of program intake staff or the assessment teams may limit their ability to see women as competitive candidates for jobs that are primarily dominated by men. Sometimes assessment questions and internalized stereotypes may lead women to screen themselves out of consideration.

Proper assessment is critical for evaluating clients’ core competencies for work readiness. It sets the stage for good case management by identifying at the outset what supportive services beyond the classroom each new client will require in order to enroll in, persist in, and complete a training program—and get and succeed in a new job. This section offers suggestions for reviewing assessment practices with a gender lens and ensuring that assessment helps to identify supportive service needs of clients.

Tool 2.1. Presentation: Assessment and Case Management Strategies to Support Women's Participation and Success in Nontraditional Jobs

The presentation offers gender-neutral and sensitive assessment techniques, as well as guidelines for case management. It covers three topics:

From a gender lens: selecting candidates likely to succeed
Case management: supporting women clients from assessment to retention
Using self-sufficiency tools in assessment and case management

Tool 2.1

Tool 2.2. Tip Sheet: Assessment Questions and Evaluation Criteria

Use this tool to identify questions and evaluation criteria that assess a candidate’s fit for your training program and case management needs. These sample questions apply a gender lens to assessment to go beyond stereotypes, identify transferable skills, and determine how to best serve incoming participants.

Tool 2.2

Both employers and the administrators of job training programs typically cite soft skills as more important than job-related skills in determining whether a person succeeds in a job. Ensure that your program builds participants’ work-readiness skills alongside vocational training. Gender inequity and gender differences create distinct job-readiness issues for women. Resources in this section offer suggestions for incorporating gender-related topics and a “gender lens” on work readiness into a training program.

Tool 3.1. Tip Sheet: Critical Skills for Job Readiness

This tool provides an overview of the critical topics in preparing program participants to be work ready. Several of these topics are particularly important to view through a gender lens.

Tool 3.1

Tool 3.2. Worksheet: Developing Job-Readiness Programming

Use this tool for envisioning and developing your organization’s approach to integrating work readiness and to identify challenges, capacity, and community linkages.

Tool 3.2

Tool 3.3. Curriculum Module: Building Successful Interviewing Skills for Apprenticeship Programs and Employment

Being a competitive candidate for the limited number of openings for a nontraditional job apprenticeship program may require more than meeting requirements, submitting a timely application, and scoring well on an aptitude test. Being a confident, perceptive interviewee can be critical to getting admitted to a program and maintaining employment. This three-part module (including five hours of classroom training) provides materials and strategies to build the preparation, skills, and self-confidence of participants in a training program, enabling them to ace an interview.

This is the Facilitator's Guide. The eight tools that follow are also part of the module.

Tool 3.3