TechHire FOA Supplemental Supporting Statement

Funding Opportunity Announcement

H-1B TechHire Partnership Grants

Supplemental Justification

Supplemental Supporting Statement A: Justification

This request seeks OMB approval under the Paperwork Reduction Act for the unique information collection requirements in the H-1B TechHire Partnership Grants Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). The Employment and Training Administration (ETA), U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), will announce the availability of approximately $100,000,000 in grant funds authorized by Section 414(c) of the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 (ACWIA), as amended (codified at 29 U.S.C. § 3224a) to train workers with the information technology (IT) skills required for well-paying, middle- and high-skilled, and high-growth jobs across a diversity of H-1B industries such as IT, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, financial services, and broadband. The TechHire grant program will focus on individuals who are at least 17 years of age, out-of-secondary school, and have barriers to training and employment opportunities, including:

• Youth and young adults who are out-of-secondary school, between the ages of 17 and 29, and have barriers to training and employment; and

• Special populations: individuals with disabilities, individuals with limited English proficiency, or individuals with criminal records with barriers to training and employment.

Projects funded by this grant program will help participants begin careers in H-1B occupations and industries which are in-demand and/or high growth in the area applicants are proposing to serve. On a limited basis, this grant program will also enable applicants to work with companies on increasing the skills of existing workers in lower-skilled jobs to move into more highly skilled positions requiring technology-related skills.

We expect to award approximately 30-40 grants with individual grant amounts ranging from $2 million to $5 million. At least $50 million will be awarded to support projects designated to serve out-of-secondary school youth and young adults with barriers to training and employment as the primary target population and no more than $50 million will be awarded to support projects designed to serve special populations. The period of performance is 48 months. Applicants should request funding that is commensurate with the scope and scale of the project. As such, regional partnerships are encouraged to apply and support smaller scale projects and programs serving rural communities. Additionally, applicants that request total funding of more than $4 million must provide evidence for the training approach(es) proposed in a separate attachment that will be evaluated by a panel of experts based on the definitions of strong, moderate, and preliminary evidence. Applicants that propose projects of more than $4 million and up to $5 million must propose to replicate, at multiple sites and/or with the targeted and other populations, strategies that have been shown by prior research to have evidence of positive impacts on education and/or employment outcomes.

Applications will include the following information collections: 1) Form SF-424 “Application for Federal Assistance,” separately cleared under OMB control number 4040-0004, 2) Project Budget, 3) Project Narrative, and 4) Attachments to the Project Narrative.

Electronic availability:

This grant solicitation is available on the grants.gov Web site. Based on past DOL experience, the Department anticipates 75 percent of responses will be submitted electronically.

Small Entities:

This information collection will not have a significant impact on a substantial number of small entities.

Assurances of confidentiality:

These grant solicitations do not offer applicants assurances of confidentiality.

Special circumstances:

This FOA implicates no special circumstances.

Burden:

Based on past experience, the DOL expects to receive approximately 150 applications from an equal number of respondents.  The ETA estimates public reporting burden for the information collection to average 20 hours per response for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining needed data, and completing and reviewing the collection of information.

150 applications x 20 hours = 3,000 hours.

The DOL has increased the October 2014, average hourly earnings in the professional and business services industry of $29.29 per hour by 40 percent (total $41.01 per hour) to monetize this burden.  See The Employment Situation—October 2014, DOL, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_11072014.pdf at page 32.

3,000 hours x $41.01 = $123,030.00

The DOL associates no other burden costs with this information collection. In addition to the application, each grantee will be required to submit quarterly financial, performance, and narrative reports to the ETA. Those information collection requirements will be cleared under a separate control number.

Total burden: 150 respondents, 150 responses, 3000 hours, $0 other cost burden.

Supplemental Supporting Statement B: Statistical Methods

This information collection does not employ statistical methods.

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