The Employee Research System (ERS) will track employment of people with significant disabilities over time. The ERS will track, at the individual worker level:
- Demographic data, such as age, race, and disability
- Employment data, such as wage rate and hours
- Benefits and funding data
- Employment status changes,such as promotions, placements, terminations, and reasons for change
This nationwide database will enable analysis of worker-level outcomes for :
- AbilityOne Workers with disabilities
- Non-AbilityOne workers with disabilities; and
- Others receiving services.
This overview of the ERS is based upon a presentation made at the 2010 NISH National Training and Achievement Conference, which may be downloaded by clicking on the link below (or on the image at right):
- Employee Research System: Building a National Employment Database [Powerpoint, 1.7MB]
Genesis of the Project
The project was initiated in response to:
- A need for baseline and impact information on the people with disabilities employed by nonprofit agencies
- A need to answer questions about the impact of the AbilityOne Program on employment of people with severe disabilities, including the quality of their work environment and outcomes achieved
- The need to move away from the use of ad hoc requests for information
Goals and Objectives
The goals of the ERS are to support:
- Research and evaluation
- Advocacy
- Policy development
- Business development and fundraising
- Benchmarking of nonprofit agency outcomes
- Continuous improvement
- Quality Work Environments (QWE) for people with disabilities.
The 538 NISH-affiliated nonprofit agencies (NPAs) employ 41,000 people with disabilities on AbilityOne contracts and overall, employ approximately 120,000 people with disabilities. This makes the AbilityOne Program one of the largest employers of people with disabilities in the country. The ERS will support understanding of the effectiveness of the AbilityOne Program.
ERS Phase 1
In Phase 1, ERS will focus on AbilityOne employees with disabilities, and will include data that is relatively easy to extract from existing automated systems at the nonprofit agencies:
- Data from payroll, plus selected additional data items
- E.g., gender, age, veteran status, wages paid, hours, work location, industry, termination data
See the ERS Data Input Specification (v.1.2) for more information on data to be included. Participation by AbilityOne-participating nonprofit agencies is voluntary but encouraged. Phase 1 will include NISH-producing nonprofit agencies only. The nonprofit agencies will extract data from their payroll and other systems to an Excel spreadsheet, which will be securely submitted to the Institute for Economic Empowerment. Data will be anonymized and will not include personally identifiable information (PII). See the Employment Data Workgroup's Current Working Documents for additional documents.
Reports will be generated by the Institute's research analyst to ensure validity and confidentiality of data. Phase 1 reports will be sent to the participating nonprofit agencies.
Later Phases of ERS
Later Phases of ERS will include:
- Additional people, such as employees with disabilities not working in AbilityOne projects; individuals working in supported community employment; employees without disabilities (at nonprofit agency discretion), and both NISH and NIB-affiliated nonprofit agencies
- Additional data, e.g., disability information, benefits, funding, worker choice, job changes, placements, training, etc. The detailed data elements have not been fully defined.
- Additional functionality, e.g., self-serve report generation and expanded access to case management software at nonprofit agencies.
