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Survey of Training Clients

A survey was conducted of HRDC clients who received financial assistance to take training under the current training model²² and who were "enhanced feepayers" or direct seat purchase clients.²³ This population of clients was divided into four main strata for the purposes of sample selection and interview completion. These criteria are:

• Reachback clients
• Non-reachback clients receiving either dependent or disability allowances
• Enhanced feepayers who are neither of the above.
• Seat purchase clients who are neither of above.

These categories were then subdivided by gender and age group. On this basis, Table 20 outlines the sampling strategy employed.

View Table 20

In total, 600 interviews were completed. As Table 21 shows, the most common reason for non-completion was invalid phone numbers (either wrong numbers or numbers not in service). There was a 9 percent refusal rate.

Survey of Non-trainees

A survey was conducted of HRDC clients who had expressed an interest in taking training with financial assistance from HRDC but who did not do so. Developing a sample frame for this survey was not straightforward. From available administrative data, it was not possible to identify with certainty which clients had actually expressed an interest in taking training as opposed to a counsellor identifying a training need. A further complication was that some third party clients who are not HRDC clients also appear in these files.

Using CATS and NESS files, all individuals were selected who had a skills enhancement need identified, an incomplete action plan and the reason for the action plan being incomplete as either "changed mind", "did not follow through" or "no contact". This produced a list of 1040 names. In order to ensure that the proportion of interviews completed with men and women would be about the same as that in the sample frame, these names were divided into two lists - one of men and one of women. These two lists were then put in a random order. Individuals were called in the order they appeared on the lists.

As Table 22 shows, a total of 485 calls were made. 14 percent of individuals contact did not fit the criteria for the survey. The two most common reasons were that they were never interested in taking training or that they were not HRDC clients when they were interested in taking training. 22 percent of these calls resulted in completed questionnaires with relevant clients for a total of 106 completed interviews.

Footnotes

22	As described in the introduction, clients who received funding as of April 1997 are considered to have received assistance under the "current" training model.
23	As explained in the introduction of this report, enhanced fee-payers are those who received more than just a continuation of the EI benefits.