Sign up to access ES-Coach

Thank you for your interest in joining the ES-Coach Project!

You are welcome to sign up if you are an employment consultant  (i.e. employment support professional, employment specialist, job developer, job coach, etc.) or a manager of a team of employment consultants. 

You will need a registration code to proceed. If you do not have a code yet, please email info@es-coach.org. If you have the registration code handy, please proceed to registration by reading the University of Massachusetts Boston consent form below.

University of Massachusetts Boston

Institute for Community Inclusion

100 Morrissey Boulevard 

Boston, MA. 02125-3393 

Consent form for the ES-Coach Beta testing 

I would like to invite you to participate in the ES-Coach research project. Participation is voluntary. The goal of ES-Coach is to assist employment consultants, their teams, and their managers with reflecting on service delivery, setting goals, and taking action to promote delivery of the most effective employment support practices for job seekers with disabilities and thus improve their employment outcomes. This project is carried out by Alberto Migliore, Research Associate at the Institute for Community Inclusion, University of Massachusetts Boston. The sponsors of the project include the Kessler Foundation along with other entities such as state IDD funding agencies, training programs, or employment providers who together contribute resources for maintaining and growing this project. For more information contact the project team at info@es-coach.org. 

Description of the Project: This project involves using a smartphone to document the daily employment supports delivered to job seekers with disabilities, reflect on the data, and take action for quality improvement. You will also have access to micro-learning content on the closing screen of the daily survey (e.g. Data, tips, short videos). Finally, you, your team, and your manager will have access to a desktop interactive live data dashboard showing data about your team’s delivery of employment supports. We will also collect baseline and follow up feedback data to assess user experience and how to improve the ES-Coach. 

If you agree to participate, your activities would include the following: 

As the manager: Support your team of employment consultants to participate in this project. 

As the employment consultant: Complete a daily survey on your smartphone (Less than 1 minute) for the duration of the project. 

As both parties: 

  • Complete a baseline survey about demographic and professional characteristics (10 minutes). 
  • During your team meetings engage in reflecting about the ES-Coach data, set team goals, and identify actions for quality improvement as part of your team quality improvement efforts. 
  • Share your feedback about ES-Coach through surveys (10 minutes), focus groups, and/or interviews (60 minutes each). 
  • Receive occasional “data emails” from us with tips about how to interpret the data dashboard and leverage the data to reflect, set goals, and take actions for quality improvement. 

Please note that the duration of this project is decided by you in conjunction with your team’s quality improvement goals. Typically, teams participated for six to twelve months. On an annual basis, participation may take about 5:00 hours total (1:25 minutes per day on average). 

Risks or Discomforts: The risks or discomforts are no greater than the risk ordinarily encountered in daily life or in the performance or work-related routine activities. 

A risk of participation is a loss of confidentiality. We will do everything we can to protect your information. To respect the privacy of your fellow participants, do not repeat what is said in the focus group to others. If you feel uncomfortable answering certain questions in the surveys, focus groups, and interviews, you may skip those questions or stop participating at any time. 

Benefits: The results of participating in this project will help researchers build a tool for supporting employment consultants, their teams, and their managers deliver effective and efficient support strategies to help job seekers with disabilities achieve their career goals.  

Costs: If you participate in this project, note that the daily survey will be delivered to your smartphone through a text message. Therefore, you might incur an expense if the plan you chose with your phone provider does NOT include unlimited free text messaging. Most phone plans include free text messages. However, please verify with your phone carrier if free text messaging applies to you. 

Confidentiality: Your participation in this project is confidential. That is, the information gathered for this project will not be published or presented in a way that would allow anyone to identify you. 

Information gathered for this project will be stored in a password-protected computer at the Institute for Community Inclusion, or UMB-issued computers that follow UMB IT security protocols including password protection and encryption (in case of use in researchers’ home offices), and the personal identifying information will be deleted when the project is complete. 

The University of Massachusetts Boston Institutional Review Board (IRB) that oversees human research and its representatives may inspect and copy your information. 

All identifiable information that could directly identify you (e.g., your name) will be removed from the information collected in this study. After we remove all identifiers, the information may also be used for future research or shared with other researchers without additional consent. 

Voluntary Participation: The decision whether or not to take part in this project is voluntary. If you do decide to take part in this project, you may terminate participation at any time by informing me at the email or phone below. You can also quit any surveys early by closing your internet browser. 

Whatever you decide will in no way involve a loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled or penalize you with negative consequences or affect your status at the organization. We will tell you about any new information that may affect your choice to stay in the research. Your alternative to participating in this research project is to not participate. 

Other Information: Alberto Migliore, John Butterworth, and a team of colleagues at the Institute for Community Inclusion at UMass Boston in partnership with the University of Minnesota developed the ES-Coach as part of our Institute’s mission to promote the employment participation of job seekers with disabilities. Your deidentified information may be used to create products or to deliver services in the future, including some that may be sold and/or make money for advancing research and the mission of the Institute for Community Inclusion. If this happens, there are no plans to pay you, or to give any compensation to you or your family.  

Questions: You have the right to ask questions about this research before you agree to participate and at any time during the study. If you have further questions about this research or if you have a research- related problem, you can reach the Principal Investigator, Alberto Migliore, at 617-287-4306 or e-mail alberto.migliore@umb.edu. If you have any questions or concerns about your rights as a research participant, please contact a representative of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, which oversees research involving human participants. The IRB may be reached at (617) 287-5374 or at human.subjects@umb.edu. 

I HAVE READ THE CONSENT FORM. MY QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED. BY TYPING MY NAME BELOW, CLICKING ‘NEXT’ ON THIS WEBPAGE, AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS I INDICATE THAT I CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS STUDY. 

Thank you!