Pilot Testing a Digital Career Literacy Training for Vocational Rehabilitation Professionals

Abstract

Digital career literacy encompasses the skills needed to find and maintain employment in the modern job market. Unfortunately, many state vocational rehabilitation (VR) professionals report feeling unprepared to help their consumers with digital career literacy tasks. To address this gap, we developed and tested five training webinars with VR professionals in Montana, Alabama, and Washington. We randomly assigned VR offices to intervention or control group. VR professionals in the intervention group received access to the training webinars. We collected survey data at baseline and 4 months after the intervention’s conclusion ( n = 136). A repeated measures ANOVA showed significant group by factor effects in counselor preparedness to use online tools during the VR process (intervention group: M1 = 24.41, SD1 = 7.62; M2 = 28.76, SD2 = 7.27; control group: M1 = 25.94, SD1 = 8.64; M2 = 27.21, SD2 = 9.14); F(1, 124) = 5.957, p = .016. A McNemar nonparametric test indicated that more VR professionals in the intervention group reported using LinkedIn at the 4-month follow-up, as compared with the control group ( p = .039). There were no significant changes in use of other online tools. This may relate to administrative policies that do not provide clear guidelines for using online tools in the counseling process.