Building Better Job Retention Supports: What PRIME Is Learning

Helping someone keep a job rarely follows a straight path. A change at work, a new disability-related need, transportation problems, concerns about benefits, or changes in health or support can quickly affect whether someone is able to stay employed.

Effective job retention support needs to be able to recognize and respond as circumstances change. Developing those services requires much the same flexibility. What looks promising at the outset may need to change once it's put into practice.

PRIME is exploring a new approach to helping people with disabilities stay employed and advance in their careers. Retention Specialists help participants build job retention skills, develop individualized plans, and work through challenges as they arise. Anchor, PRIME's AI-supported tool, provides another way to stay connected with participants and identify concerns that may need attention. Peer supports offer another source of connection, drawing on shared experiences to help participants navigate workplace challenges.

The evaluation team is examining how these supports work together in practice, including what's working as expected, where challenges emerge, and what adjustments might improve the approach.

Learning From What Happens During Implementation

PRIME's evaluation team uses a weekly recruitment waterfall to track how people move through screening, intake, and enrollment across participating states. This shared view helps the team see where progress may be slowing and where a closer look is needed.

Waterfall diagram of PRIME’s recruitment process, flowing from Referral to Intake to Enrollment. Callouts at Intake note significant drop-off, ask whether the intake survey asks too much of participants, and describe the current focus on balancing data needs with participant burden.

For example, early monitoring has raised questions about why some participants haven't completed the intake process. One possibility worth exploring is whether the length of PRIME's intake survey might be a factor. It raises a practical question:

What information do we really need, and where might the process be asking more of participants than necessary?

That may sound like a small detail. But it points to a larger question that matters for employment services:

Are the processes we create helping people access support, or are they unintentionally making participation harder?

As a demonstration project, PRIME can identify and address issues as they emerge, making improvements while the approach is being put into practice.

Making Sure the Data Answers the Right Questions

The evaluation team is developing a plan that connects what PRIME wants to learn with the information needed to answer those questions.

What do we want to learn?

What information do we need?

Where will it come from?

What are we learning?

What might we change?

The plan identifies what information the team needs, where it will come from, and how it will be used. This includes looking at who enrolls in PRIME, what supports participants receive, how they experience those services, and whether they retain their jobs and advance in their careers.

Looking at this information together will help the team better understand how PRIME's services relate to participants' experiences and employment outcomes, while recognizing what the findings can, and cannot, tell us.

Learning About AI and Job Retention

Because Anchor is being developed and refined as PRIME moves forward, evaluating its role in job retention services is especially important.

The team is examining not only whether the technology can be useful, but also how it should be used alongside human support, what limitations emerge, and how feedback from the people using it should shape the tool. The use of AI also raises important questions related to accessibility, privacy, ethics (Skerritt, 2023), trust, and the role of human judgment.

The goal is not simply to introduce a new technology. It is to understand whether technology can support better job retention services while keeping people, their choices, and their experiences at the center of the work.

Why These Lessons Matter for VR

PRIME's experiences may offer practical lessons VR agencies can apply to their own services. These could include ways to simplify intake, identify staffing and training needs, and understand how AI tools can fit into everyday services.

Of particular interest is how AI tools can work alongside VR professionals: how technology can help identify potential concerns, how professionals use that information to guide their support, and how the two can help respond to customers' changing needs.

As PRIME continues to evaluate its approach, agencies will also learn more about how these combined supports relate to job retention and career advancement. Those findings may help agencies decide whether and how elements of PRIME could strengthen their own services.

Reviewed by: David Wittenburg, Ph.D., University of Maryland Senior Faculty Specialist

Last reviewed: October 2026