apple Follow-Up at Exit and 3, 6 and 12 Months after Exit

Exit and follow-up interviews are important pieces of the Follow-up Service. As we said in the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Requirements section of this module, Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) service providers must contact learners who exit their programs at the time of exit and at 3, 6 and 12 months after the exit. During these interviews, you must complete applicable sections on the Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) Exit and Follow-Up Form.

As we have noted in the Objectives and Plan and Design sections of this module, the Follow-Up service is more than the exit and 3, 6 and 12-month after exit interviews. MTCU also requires evaluation of the other four LBS services and customer satisfaction. Therefore, we recommend that you include other agency-specific questions in your exit and post-exit surveys.

Making Collection and Recording Convenient and Effective

One of MTCU’s requirements is to “ensure that information collection and recording makes follow-up convenient and effective.” When we asked some of Ontario’s LBS practitioners how this could be accomplished during the exit and 3, 6 and 12-month surveys, they offered the following suggestions:

  • To make it convenient and effective for the service provider:
    • be clear on who will do the follow-up for your program
    • use reminders or set aside a certain day each month to do it
    • have a procedure for recording how many times and ways you try to contact a past learner for follow-up before quitting
    • record information in both the learner’s file and in EOIS-CaMS
    • have procedures on who is to review survey results and take action, if necessary (for example, Program Manager, Executive Director)
    • use Employment Ontario Information System – Case Management System (EOIS-CaMS) reports as reminders when follow-up review events are due and for management overview (LBS – All Data – Outcomes/Follow-ups and Follow-up Events reports)
  • To make it convenient and effective for the learner:
    • call/text after hours if the learner works
    • send the survey as an email attachment or set it up in SurveyMonkey and email a link, making sure you give clear instructions on how it can be filled out and returned and giving the date you would like it returned by
    • find out why, if learner says training did not help them prepare for future employment
    • keep questions on your agency’s follow-up survey minimal, yet try to get clarifications when needed
    • if the learner has more than one service plan, i.e., leaves and is closed but later returns and a new service plan is opened, you may be doing follow-up for both plans within a short time period. If this happens, explain why the contacts are so frequent and which service plan the survey or interview relates to.

Questions and Activities for Reflection

1. Is your follow-up with past learners up-to-date? If not what two things could you or another staff member do to make the collection of this information more manageable?

2. What strategies might you try in order to follow up on learners:

  • who work during your office hours
  • whose phone always goes to an answering machine
  • who do not respond to emails?

3. Look over your agency’s follow-up survey again. Is there a way you could shorten the survey without losing valuable information?

4. Many businesses do follow-up customer satisfaction surveys. Think back on a follow-up experience you had that you would consider both convenient and effective. What made it so?

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