Switchboard Blog
Switchboard’s blog posts offer a wide range of insights on the newcomer experience, including practical tips for navigating the resettlement process, resource lists tailored to community needs, case studies about relevant programs, engaging stories of successful integration, and more.
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2025 Changes to the Naturalization Civics Test: What Service Providers Need to Know
On September 18, 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a Federal Register Notice announcing implementation of the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test. Starting on October 20, 2025, the test will consist of 20 questions chosen from a pool of 128 rather than 10 questions from a pool of 100 in the 2008 version. Passing…
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This blog post is adapted from the Switchboard toolkit Job Counseling for Career Pathways. Across the country, there is an increasing emphasis on career pathways programming in refugee employment programs. Whether you are looking to build a dedicated career pathways program or simply tweak existing program offerings to better serve clients looking to move beyond that…
- Daniel Wilkinson
Welcome to the Switchboard blog! For our first post, we thought we’d share how our team came up with the name Switchboard. You may have heard our program previously referred to as the Refugee Technical Assistance Program, or RTAP. We knew we needed a name that was more memorable and readily identifiable. Here is the…
- Meg Gibbon
This blog post was written by Higher Employment Services Technical Assistance and is included as an archived post on the Switchboard blog. Refugee young adults in the U.S. between the ages of 16 and 24 may have narrow educational and career training options due to low English language proficiency and a lack of formal education. Job…
- Katie Jipson
This blog post was written by Higher Employment Services Technical Assistance and is included as an archived post on the Switchboard blog. What constitutes unlawful harassment? Harassment is a form of employment discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and the Americans…
- Nicole Redford
This blog post was written by the Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Assistance (META) Project and is included as an archived post on the Switchboard blog. Transitioning to a new database can be a challenging process! While we know that every organization has staff with differing capacities and system roles, here are some general practices to…
- Meg Gibbon
This blog post was written by the Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Assistance (META) Project and is included as an archived post on the Switchboard blog. Looking for more data on humanitarian immigrant populations? Check out the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Data Hub’s Humanitarian Protection Statistics, where you can find interactive maps and databases. The map pictured…
- Meg Gibbon