The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to do a bigger job of analyzing the effectiveness of its “promising” tech education pilot program to determine how well it’s helping veterans locate tasks, according to a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO report looked at VA’s Veterans Employment through Technology Education Courses (VET TEC) pilot program, which is open to veterans who are eligible for school attendance under the GI Act. The report states that the pilot assignment is designed “for veteran technology skills in PC programming, PC software, multimedia applications, knowledge processing, or data science. “
VET TEC was created after the adoption of the Harry W. Colmery Veterans Education Assistance Act, also known as the Forever GI Act, in 2017, which mandated the branch to identify a pilot program to “offer eligible veterans the opportunity to enroll in technology education programs. The five-year pilot project, which was officially introduced in 2019 with $15 million in annual funding, has since earned more money from Congress, with the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which became law in March 2022, authorizing a higher $80 million for the program.
The GAO found that more than 6700 veterans enrolled in VET TEC between May 2019 and May 2022, and approximately 66% of those enrolled completed the program. But the report noted that VA has been unable to increase the employment rate of program graduates, meaning that “VA could unknowingly share erroneous data about VET TEC’s good fortune in employing veterans who complete the program. “
“VA calculates an employment measure for certain VET TEC participants for whom VA has made a final milestone payment decision,” the report says. “However, VA calculates an employment rate for all VET TEC participants who have completed the program, according to other government and industry approaches. As a result, VA has enough data to compare VET TEC with other systems or to compare the program’s effectiveness in getting veterans to find employment.
While the VA states that 66% of all VET TEC participants were hired 180 days or more after completing the program, GAO research, which included all VET TEC participants regardless of when they finished their education, found that 46% of VET TEC participants were hired graduates.
The report also noted that VA also failed to account for the thirteen percent of veterans who dropped out of the program, as VA officials “do not systematically collect or analyze knowledge to perceive why some of those registered drop out of training. “
An earlier GAO report from February 2022 that provided “preliminary observations” of the pilot program noted considerations about the program, noting at the time that “VA had not yet implemented maximum maximum productive practices for the effective design of the pilot program, with the exception of stakeholder communication. “
“Specifically, VA has no documented and measurable goals for the program,” the previous report said. “As such, VA cannot yet have an evaluation method or evaluation plan to measure pilot performance. “
The GAO’s most recent report acknowledged a number of positive benefits of the pilot program, adding its higher final touch rates and varying higher enrollment levels. a service-connected condition,” such as an illness or injury suffered or disturbed by your military service, which “working-age veterans. “
But the GAO once again found that the lack of “consistent, transparent, and measurable program objectives” hampered program effectiveness.
“As a result, evaluating and evaluating VET TEC until the end of pilot assignment is likely to be challenging for VA,” the report said.
The GAO made six recommendations to the VA, adding that the branch “develops an employment rate calculation according to approaches” and “determines the knowledge necessary to fully count employment outcomes. “
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