For some workers, career advancement or salary increases mean they no longer receive means-tested public assistance, and preparing for that loss can be difficult for them because of complex public assistance rules and unpredictable income and expenses.
The Atlanta Fed’s Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecasting Tool (CLIFF) helps workers make more informed financial decisions about job training and employment in the context of loss of welfare benefits. Since the beginning of 2021, approximately 20 organizations across the country have participated in the national pilot program of the CLIFF tool.1 Participants, who included human resources services, workforce development, and financial coaching and counseling organizations, described their typical clients as low-income, without higher education, receiving government benefits, or single mothers.
A national pilot implementation evaluation of the CLIFF tool was conducted to gather feedback on the functionality of the tool and to identify challenges organizations face when adopting a calculation tool like CLIFF. The full results of the implementation evaluation were published in the Atlanta Fed’s 2024 discussion paper, “Benefits of Cliffs Coaching with the Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF Tool: A National Pilot Implementation Evaluation.” After a brief description of the CLIFF tool, this Partner Update article summarizes the findings of the study.
What is the CLIFF tool?
The CLIFF tool is designed to help families make more informed financial decisions about job training and employment by including estimates of occupational wages, public assistance receipts, and the cost of paying for basic needs such as housing, child care, and health care.
At the time of the pilot, the CLIFF suite included two tools: a dashboard and a planner.3 The CLIFF dashboard allows users to explore the long-term financial returns of up to two occupations at a time. The dashboard requires users to input relatively little information, such as location, the number of people and their ages in the household, the public assistance programs the user receives, and the user’s occupational choice. The tool estimates household expenses such as rent, transportation, and child care costs.
The CLIFF Planner is a more powerful version of the CLIFF Dashboard, providing more detailed results tailored to each user, such as expenses, training costs, grants and subsidies, customized starting salaries, etc. Figure 1 shows the main features of the Dashboard and Planner and highlights the differences between the two tools.
Figure 1: Basic functions of the CLIFF tool
Source: Author
Findings from the pilot
Based on analysis of interviews and focus groups with people who have implemented the CLIFF tool, the discussion paper identified three broad themes:
Identifying the right demographic Integrating CLIFF into existing organizational operations Integrating CLIFF into coaching sessions
Identifying the right audience
While coaches frequently noted that CLIFF is most beneficial for individuals who are looking for positive changes in their lives and are ready to think long-term about their careers and finances, coaches typically found CLIFF less relevant for clients who are “in crisis” and looking for help with immediate challenges, such as paying unexpected bills, securing reliable and affordable housing, or finding mental health resources.
Integrate CLIFF into existing organizational operations
The most commonly cited challenges to integrating CLIFF into organizational operations were personnel and time constraints. Staff turnover, exacerbated by COVID-19 disruptions during the pilot, posed significant challenges for many organizations.
Additionally, coaches often had too many responsibilities and therefore limited time available to implement CLIFF. For these coaches, CLIFF could be too time-consuming to incorporate into short sessions that were already filled with programmatic and administrative requirements. Organizations that had a formal process for implementing CLIFF into coaching sessions generally had higher adoption rates and more positive experiences.
Integrating CLIFF into your coaching sessions
Coaches frequently cited two main challenges to incorporating CLIFF into their counseling sessions. First, they sometimes struggled to gather all of the client information needed to use the CLIFF tool. Second, some coaches felt they needed specific training on how to coach clients facing the benefits cliff. Although the CLIFF tool pilot team provided technical training on how to use the tool, this information did not include strategies for navigating difficult financial times.
Implications for practice
The CLIFF pilot and implementation evaluation provided many valuable insights. Understanding client readiness is critical for organizations wanting to introduce tools to guide clients through career advancement, public assistance changes, and benefit reductions. For example, stabilizing an individual’s financial situation is a critical step before using long-term planning tools like the CLIFF Dashboard or CLIFF Planner.
Successful implementation of the CLIFF tool or similar calculators also requires careful consideration of how to integrate such tools into the counseling workflow. Unless coaches take the time to thoroughly explore the tool and thoroughly discuss the results with their clients, such tools may be of limited utility.
Finally, improved training would help coaches discuss findings with their clients: Coaches should be equipped with basic details of major public assistance programs and be prepared with a set of coaching strategies to help workers cope with the loss of public assistance.
By Brittany Berken (CED Director and Chief Counsel, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), John Rees (Senior Counsel, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), Alex Ruder (CED Director and Chief Counsel, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), and Erin Terry (formerly of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, now a PhD student at the University of Washington). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve System. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.
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1 The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta does not provide grants or funds to the public or to Partner organizations. The Bank does not endorse or make any representations regarding the suitability of Partner organizations, their products, or their programs, nor does it advise on the distribution of funds by Partners.
2 Short-term results will be reported in future studies.
After three pilots, we launched a third tool called CLIFF Snapshot, which models immediate employment changes that are appropriate for workers who are simply looking to stabilize their finances rather than developing long-term career plans.
