Measuring Job Quality in Small Businesses

Opportunity Fund is the nation’s leading nonprofit small business lender, providing microloans to entrepreneurs whose small businesses have not been able to access financial resources from traditional lenders. While Opportunity Fund has successfully provided over $440 million in loans to underserved entrepreneurs so that they create and retain higher quality jobs, it is still revising its techniques to measure the impact of its loans on small businesses and the economy. In this pursuit, Opportunity Fund has committed to exploring opportunities to measure and analyze job quality as a top research objective, enlisting a Capstone team to provide relevant industry standards by which to query a subset of its borrowers on the quality of jobs they provide. The team divided the project into four phases: a literature review and environmental scan, data analysis of previous Opportunity Fund surveys and engagements with borrowers, developing and deploying a trial survey assessing job quality, and a culminating final report with the team’s findings and recommendations.