The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project was undertaken to identify effective strategies for helping low-income parents work more steadily and advance in the labor market. The 15 ERA demonstration projects that were operating in nine states (California, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, South Carolina; Tennessee, and Texas) as of fall 2001 were evaluated by using a random assignment procedure that was tailored to each individual project. Several projects targeted "hard to employ" groups, whereas others focused on low-income working parents and helping participants advance to higher-paying jobs. In most ERA projects, case management was not seen as the main service strategy but as the starting point to deliver other services or activities, such as education and training, financial incentives, career planning, rehabilitation services, and job search assistance. Sites were responding to the challenges of encouraging and maintaining low-wage working parents' participation in the workforce with aggressive outreach, tailored services, financial incentives, and advancement strategies that do not rely on traditional classroom-based education and training. The following items are appended: descriptions of the ERA programs; a discussion of the project evaluation procedure; and key welfare rules in the ERA states. (Contains 14 tables and 29 references.) (MN)