Although WISEs see poverty amelioration and social integration through employment as central to their mission, very little systematic research has been done in the U.S. on these emergent antipoverty interventions at the organizational or field level. Given the focus in the workforce development literature on the importance of creating programs that build specific skills in industries where there are employer demands for these skills, this paper adds to the current research on transitional jobs through an assessment of an understudied aspect of WISEs: the industrial niches where they are active, the occupations associated with those industrial niches, and the steps WISE models take to add value to the employment-based skill building upon which their workforce development model depends.
