A Practical Guide to Pre-Employment Transition Services (Pre-ETS) for Schools

Last updated: June 4, 2026 · Reviewed by Dr. Miriam Gayle, EdD, VP of Operations, Ori Learning

Pre-Employment Transition Services (Pre-ETS) are five services that state Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) agencies must make available to students with disabilities to help them prepare for employment and life after high school. They are authorized under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and delivered to a broad group of students — not just those with an open VR case. For school teams, Pre-ETS is a chance to give transition instruction a practical structure, with competitive integrated employment (CIE) — real jobs in integrated settings, paid at or above minimum wage at rates comparable to coworkers without disabilities — as the goal the services work toward.

I have spent more than twenty years working with transition-age students, and the question I hear most from new transition coordinators is some version of “Where do I even start?” If that is you, you are not alone. This guide is the answer I wish I had: what Pre-ETS actually involves, who delivers each service, how funding really works, and how a structured curriculum makes the five services manageable instead of overwhelming.

What are the five required Pre-ETS services?

Under the Rehabilitation Act as amended by WIOA (Rehabilitation Act §113), every state VR agency must make five Pre-Employment Transition Services available to eligible and potentially eligible students with disabilities (34 CFR §361.48(a)(2)):

1. Job exploration counseling — helping students learn about careers, their own interests, and the local labor market.
2. Work-based learning experiences — in-school or after-school opportunities, including internships and job shadowing, provided in an integrated community setting to the maximum extent possible.
3. Counseling on postsecondary education and training — guidance on college, trade school, certificate programs, and other paths after high school.
4. Workplace readiness training — the workplace readiness and employability skills of work: communication, time management, problem-solving, and independent-living skills.
5. Instruction in self-advocacy — teaching students to understand their strengths and learn if, when, and how to disclose a disability and request accommodations, including through peer mentoring.

One quick clarification, because it trips up a lot of teams: these five are the required services. With funds left after the five are covered, VR agencies may also provide nine authorized activities — and coordination activities, like attending IEP meetings when invited, are something VR is required to carry out, not an optional extra. So “the five” are the floor, not the whole of Pre-ETS.

Here is what each service tends to look like once it lands in an actual school, and where a sequenced curriculum can carry the classroom-based pieces.

On paper these read like five neat boxes. In a real classroom they blur together, and that is a good thing. In two decades of this work, the service that changes the most minds is work-based learning. The first time a student clocks in somewhere real — a hospital supply room, a grocery back-of-house, a campus mailroom — something shifts that no classroom lesson can manufacture. A student who had told me flat-out she “wasn’t a work person” came back from her first shift different, because a supervisor had actually needed her to be there. That experience gave every other service somewhere to land. Now job exploration had a reference point, self-advocacy had a reason, and postsecondary planning stopped being abstract.

That instinct is backed by the research. In the secondary-transition evidence base synthesized by the National Technical Assistance Center on Transition, paid work experience during high school is one of the strongest predictors of post-school employment for students with disabilities, across disability categories (Mazzotti et al., 2021). It is a strong argument for prioritizing work-based learning early, not saving it for last.

Who is eligible for Pre-ETS?

Pre-ETS serve students with disabilities who are “potentially eligible” for VR services, which means a student does not need a fully approved VR case to receive them. The term matters: a student who is eligible has applied and been determined eligible for VR, while a student who is potentially eligible is a student with a disability who has not applied for VR services or has not yet been determined eligible. Federally, a “student with a disability” must be enrolled in a secondary, postsecondary, or other recognized education program, fall within the state’s age range, and either receive services under IDEA or qualify as an individual with a disability under Section 504 (34 CFR §361.5(c)(51)). In many states, students with an IEP or 504 plan who are still in school and within the state’s age range may be considered potentially eligible. Documentation, consent, and referral steps vary by state, so the specifics are worth confirming locally.

The 504-plan inclusion is worth pausing on, because plenty of guides miss it: Pre-ETS are not only for students with IEPs.

This broad eligibility is the whole point. Pre-ETS is designed to reach students early, while they still have the structure of school around them, rather than waiting until after graduation when support tends to fall away. The students I worry about most are the ones whose support needs are least visible on paper, the quiet ones drifting toward a gap year that turns into three. Pre-ETS exists to close that gap before it opens.

How are Pre-ETS funded?

Short answer: Pre-ETS are funded through state VR agencies under WIOA, which must reserve at least 15% of the state’s federal VR allotment specifically for Pre-ETS (34 CFR §361.65(a)(3)). VR funds are a supplement to, never a replacement for, the transition services schools are already required to provide under IDEA.

This is the part I see well-meaning teams get wrong, so it is worth being precise. The 15% reserve is real, and it is meaningful money. But VR cannot supplant a district’s IDEA obligations: anything the school already owes students as part of a free appropriate public education (FAPE) — staff time, transportation, related supports, required transition services — stays the district’s responsibility. VR funding may support eligible Pre-ETS activities, depending on the state’s model and its agreements, but it does not automatically shift school costs to VR.

In practice, that usually means a state-approved cooperative or interagency agreement that defines who delivers what and who pays for it. In the districts where I have seen this work best, the relationship was a standing one: a named VR counselor who knew our students, sat in on planning, and treated our staff as partners rather than referral sources. If you do not have that yet, building it is the highest-leverage thing a transition coordinator can do this year.

How do schools deliver Pre-ETS?

Delivery models vary by state, and Pre-ETS are often delivered to students in groups rather than one at a time. Group delivery is part of why a consistent, sequenced curriculum matters so much: you are teaching the same content to a roomful of students with very different needs. Most models fall into a partnership between the school and VR:

• VR-led — a VR counselor or contracted provider delivers services directly, often in group sessions at the school.
• School-led with VR support — special education or transition staff deliver the classroom-based services using an agreed curriculum, coordinated with VR. Whether and how VR reimburses any of this is state-dependent and set by a formal agreement, so do not assume reimbursement.
• Blended — schools handle workplace readiness and self-advocacy instruction in the classroom, while VR coordinates community-based work experiences.

The challenge most teams hit is not whether Pre-ETS matters. It is delivering all five services consistently, across multiple staff and a wide range of student needs, in a way the team can document. The year I tried to build it all from scratch, my “curriculum” was a folder of one-off lessons that lived in my head. When I was out, the program stopped. The fix wasn’t working harder. It was having a sequence anyone on the team could pick up and teach.

What VR typically expects you to document

Documentation is the quiet pain point of Pre-ETS, and the checklists rarely tell you what VR actually wants to see. Every state VR agency sets its own referral, consent, and reimbursement paperwork, so treat this as the common core and confirm the specifics with your VR partner. For each student and each service, you generally need to capture:

• The student’s eligibility or potentially-eligible status, with consent and referral as required by your state.
• The Pre-ETS service category (which of the five).
• The date, duration, and whether the service was delivered individually or in a group.
• The provider and the location.
• A short description of the activity and the student’s participation or outcome.

This is dull work, and it is exactly where a structured program earns its keep: when the curriculum is mapped to the five services, logging hours per service per student stops being a scramble.

How to evaluate a transition curriculum

If group delivery and documentation are the real problems, then the question is not “which brand” but “does this curriculum solve those problems?” Before adopting anything, I ask:

• Does it map clearly to the classroom-based Pre-ETS services (workplace readiness, self-advocacy, career exploration, postsecondary planning)?
• Is it sequenced, so a substitute or paraprofessional can pick up the next lesson without me?
• Does it differentiate, so the same activity works for students with a wide range of support needs in one group?
• Does it make documentation easier, not harder — can I show a VR partner what was taught, when, and to whom?

A curriculum that does those four things is far easier to justify and document than a folder of one-off lessons, which matters when you are accountable to both your business office and a VR partner. A planned curriculum like the Ori Learning Transition Curriculum is one example: its employment-skills lessons walk students through building a resume, completing a job application, and practicing interviews — workplace-readiness and job-exploration content that maps to two of the five services. Because the lessons are built with differentiation tiers, the same activity can reach students with mild, moderate, or more significant support needs, which matters when a single Pre-ETS group spans very different ability levels.

If you’re weighing options, our guide on how to choose a transition curriculum walks through the questions worth asking before you commit, and the most common mistakes teams make with transition lesson plans.

Pre-ETS vs. transition services in the IEP

Short answer: Transition services are part of the IEP process under IDEA, and they are the district’s responsibility. Pre-ETS are made available and funded through VR under WIOA. They overlap and should be coordinated, but they come from different laws and different funding streams.

This distinction matters more than it sounds, because Pre-ETS is a VR-side service framework, not the school’s IDEA compliance framework. Pre-ETS activities can be written into an IEP transition plan as coordinated activities, but participating in Pre-ETS does not, on its own, make a transition plan IDEA-compliant. A school still owes measurable postsecondary goals updated annually, age-appropriate transition assessments, transition services including a course of study, annual IEP goals tied to the student’s transition needs, evidence the student was invited to the IEP meeting, and — where appropriate — agency invitation with consent: the full set of Indicator 13 obligations.

Pre-ETS or a life-skills program: which fits your students?

It is easy to confuse Pre-ETS with functional life-skills instruction, but the difference is about the student’s goal, not the student’s disability. Functional life-skills curricula often emphasize daily living, community participation, and independence. Pre-ETS-aligned employment-readiness content focuses more directly on career exploration, workplace readiness, self-advocacy, postsecondary options, and work-based learning.

Here is the part many guides get badly wrong: Pre-ETS are for all eligible and potentially eligible students with disabilities, including those with the most significant disabilities. That is not a footnote — it is central to WIOA’s intent. A student working on functional daily-living skills still needs Pre-ETS to explore supported or customized employment options. The goal of Pre-ETS is competitive integrated employment, and the law is explicit about including the students who have historically been written out of that conversation. Many strong programs run functional life-skills instruction and Pre-ETS concurrently, and many students need instruction that draws from both.

So the useful question is not “mild or significant?” It is: what does this student need to be doing eighteen months from now, and what are their measurable postsecondary goals? The mismatch shows up quickly when the answer and the materials do not line up: a college-bound junior may tune out if the work feels unrelated to employment or postsecondary goals, while a student who needs concrete, repeated practice may struggle with an abstract career-interest inventory. Align the instruction to each student’s goal — competitive integrated employment, postsecondary education or training, or independent living — and let the Pre-ETS framework organize it.

Getting started: a Pre-ETS checklist for schools

1. Identify your state VR agency’s Pre-ETS contact and find the written policy, eligible age range, consent and referral process, and cooperative-agreement terms.
2. Map your current transition instruction to the five required services, and find the gaps.
3. Decide your delivery model (VR-led, school-led with VR support, or blended) and clarify which costs are IDEA/LEA responsibilities and which VR may support.
4. Adopt or build a sequenced curriculum for the classroom-based services (workplace readiness, self-advocacy, career exploration, postsecondary planning).
5. Set up VR-aligned documentation so services are trackable by category, date, duration, provider, and group-vs-individual delivery.
6. Invite VR to the IEP table with consent, and review your Indicator 13 transition obligations separately — Pre-ETS does not satisfy them on its own.

Frequently asked questions

Is Pre-ETS the same as transition services in the IEP?
No. Transition services are part of the IEP process under IDEA; Pre-ETS are made available and funded through Vocational Rehabilitation under WIOA. They overlap and should be coordinated, but they come from different laws and different funding streams, which is exactly why coordinating them well matters.

Do students need an approved VR case to receive Pre-ETS?
Generally no. Pre-ETS are available to students who are “potentially eligible,” which includes most students with disabilities still in school, though state VR agencies may require consent or a referral. A signed VR application is not required to begin the five services — but an application is needed for the individualized VR services and an Individualized Plan for Employment (IPE) that go beyond Pre-ETS.

What ages does Pre-ETS cover?
The exact range is set by each state. The minimum generally aligns with the start of transition planning, commonly as early as age 14 or 15, and the maximum aligns with the state’s school-eligibility age (often 21, sometimes older). Confirm the specific window with your state VR agency.

Are Pre-ETS only for students with significant disabilities, or only for diploma-track students?
Neither. Pre-ETS are for all students with disabilities who are eligible or potentially eligible, including students with the most significant disabilities. The goal is competitive integrated employment, and students working on functional skills can receive Pre-ETS to explore supported or customized employment alongside life-skills instruction.

Can a single curriculum cover all five Pre-ETS services?
A single curriculum typically covers the classroom-based services well — workplace readiness, self-advocacy, career exploration, and postsecondary planning. Work-based learning experiences usually require community placements coordinated with VR; a curriculum can prepare students for and document those experiences, but the experience itself requires real workplace exposure.