Workforce Developments

New funding for projects to help laid-off workers

The US Department of Labor has just announced $20 million in funding for projects that build skills and employment options for workers who are currently or are at risk of becoming "dislocated." That's workforce development jargon for "laid off."

Only state workforce agencies are eligible to compete.

There are four categories of funding:

1. Entrepreneurship Opportunities for Dislocated Workers, to help people launch small businesses;
   
2. Getting Ahead of the Curve: Raising Educational/Skill Levels of Workers in Declining Industries, to upgrade skills for workers likely to be laid off;
3. Innovative Adult Learning Models for Dislocated Workers, to identify new and innovative ways to train unemployed workers; and
4. Preventing Dislocations of TANF Recipients Moving Into Entry  Level Jobs Subject to Economic Churn, to help former TANF recipients maintain  employment and enter or advance within high-growth industries

You can read the full Federal Register announcement here. Deadline to submit a proposal is June 13, 2008.

In other DOL funding news, ETA announced Wednesday it plans to give more than twice that much, $49.5 million, in grants for projects to "enhance education and career opportunities in high schools" (Federal Register announcement). Only six school districts nationwide have been invited to compete: Baltimore City, MD; Berkshire Farms, NY; New York City, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Puerto Rico; and Salem-Keizer, OR. However, faith- and community-based organizations working with those school districts are also eligible to submit proposals. 

Web 2.0: coming to a government agency near you

Last week I highlighted how foundations are using new interactive online technologies to get out their message and influence policymaking. Today, let's talk government.

Government? That bastion of slow-moving bureaucracy? Embracing change? Engaging their own workers in problem solving?

The May 2008 issue of Governing magazine has a big article about how government agencies are using wikis for improve internal management, Working in Wiki. Don't know what a "wiki" is? Click here for a short glossary of some key terms they use.

Authors Perlman and Maynard explain why it's important - and why it's so challenging - for government agencies to embrace these new technologies:

The wiki world is all about making government more effective by enlarging the idea bank and making it possible to tap into the minds of those all along the job line — from workers in the field to middle managers to top brass. It's like the old Suggestion Box, only more specific, immediate and rewarding. And more challenging. The adjustments needed in terms of mindset and operations can be huge, even for the chief information officers of government agencies. They have to master the new tools, then persuade their agencies to experiment with the technologies, and then support them as they do.

They offer examples of government agencies that are on the cutting edge, from the chief information officer for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, to California's largest public health district, to the community mental health department in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Take this latter case for example - the agency is using wikis internally to keep their caseworkers updated as new information is available. Case workers can add to the wiki as they learn about new resources for clients, making that info available to their peers. Sound like something a workforce development agency could do?

Check out this article. You might be surprised to learn what other government agencies are doing.

(Thanks to Virginia Hamilton of the California Workforce Association for passing this one along!)

Action update on unemployment benefits bill

Thanks to reader Kristie for bringing this to my attention:

The House of Representatives may act as early as this Wednesday, May 14, on a bill that will include extension of unemployment benefits for up to an additional 26 weeks. This was originally part of the economic stimulus package that brought you the $600 IRS check, but was eliminated during negotiations. For more details on the proposal, click here and here.

The National Employment Law Project, on their website UnemployedWorkers.org, explains some crucial details:

The President is still on record opposing the extension of jobless benefits despite the continued loss of jobs reported last month by the Department of Labor.  For the President to understand the importance of the bill, it is critically necessary that the extension of jobless benefits continues to build strong bi-partisan support.

If you want your member of Congress to hear from you on this important topic, now is the time to contact them. You can find your rep here, and NELP has some pointers on contacting them here.

Job hunter image: Ohio Department of Job and Family Services

Learn how to podcast!

I'll be teaching a podcasting workshop in Los Angeles on June 1. If you want to learn how to record, edit and upload your own work online and you're in the area, this is a great place to start. I'll be teaching the class at Writers at Work, a local nonprofit writers' center. The workshop is designed primarily for writers, but the basic audio editing and internet skills are the same for everyone. Here's the 411:

Podcasting for Writers: Getting your work heard online

When: Sunday June 1, 2008, 2-5 p.m.
Where: Writers At Work, 4022 Fountain Avenue, Suite 202, Los Angeles, CA 90029
Instructor: Bronwyn Mauldin
Cost: $45
Pre-registration is required. Space is limited.

From the course description:

With today's technology, podcasting is as easy as sending an email and can be done from a home computer.  Audio editing software is "point and click," and uploading mp3 files to the Internet is just like adding an attachment to an email message.

In this workshop we'll cover the basics of how to record, edit and upload your own podcasts. By the end of the workshop you'll have a rough draft of a podcast that you can finish editing and post online.

To get the most out of this workshop you'll need to bring your own laptop and headphones.

For more details on the workshop and how to sign up, send me an email.

Who's hiring ex-offenders?

The staff of the Marin Employment Connection, the one stop in Marin County, partners  with the California Re-Entry Program at San Quentin to offer monthly job search workshops to inmates.  Topics include assessment, interviewing, applications, resumes, and effective workplace communication.

One of the most common questions we get during our workshops at San Quentin is "Where is the list of employers who are willing to hire ex-felons?"  Unfortunately, it's not that easy.

Some industries are known for being ex-offender friendly, such as the building trades and apprenticeship programs.  Some non-profits such as Goodwill Industries are also known for giving people a second chance.  The Home Builders Institute and the Colorado Department of Corrections published a guide for the workforce community, "Building Jobs, Rebuilding Lives: Placing Ex-Offenders with Employers in the Residential and Light Commercial Construction Industry."  I hear from colleagues in the building trades that they will hire ex-offenders who can show up to work on time, have adequate "soft" skills such as the ability to take direction, and test clean for drugs.

We tell workshop participants that you never know whether an employer is open to working with ex-felons, so they should not automatically rule anyone out.  Although most people experience job search as a sea of rejection before getting to a "yes," many predict that the upcoming labor shortage caused by the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation will force employers to look to more untraditional pools of labor.

Do you have particular industries that you find to be open to hiring ex-offenders?

New series to tackle prisoner re-entry

Every day this blog gets lots of hits from people searching phrases like jobs for ex offenders employers, training programs for ex offenders, or employment outcomes for recidivism. In other words, this is an issue of great interest.

No wonder. The prison population rate in the U.S. far outstrips any other country in the industrialized world. The OECD Factbook 2008 reports that 725 of every 100,000 Americans are in prison or jail. By comparison, India, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria and Italy each has in its prisons fewer than 100 out of every 100,000 inhabitants.

Whatever your opinion of those numbers and their causes, one thing is certain: a high prison population translates into a large number of people living prison eventually. Some 600,000 each year in the U.S. Most of them will need significant help to re-integrate into society and find jobs where they can support themselves and their families. I think this is one of the biggest problems facing American society and our nation's workforce development system. We can't leave it to the prisons to handle this on their own.

That's why Workforce Developments is launching a new monthly column. Starting tomorrow, on the first Wednesday of each month Racy Ming will write about Prisoner Re-entry issues. Here's a brief bio:

Racy Ming has ten years experience in education and workforce evaluation and program administration. She's currently manager of the Marin Employment Connection, the one-stop in Marin County, CA. She is also chair of the board for the California Re-Entry Program at San Quentin. 

After earning her undergraduate and masters degrees at Stanford University, Racy worked in education research and program evaluation for SRI International and at Mills College in Oakland.  Her work on desegregation politics in San Francisco was published in the journal, Urban Education. At the Marin Employment Connection, she has oversight of one-stop operations, Workforce Investment Act programs, grant funded projects and the county's General Assistance employable program. She also served for a number of years as a commissioner on the Sonoma County Human Services Commission.

A native of San Francisco, she is a big fan of the Stanford men's basketball team, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (check out this year's documentary winner, Planet B-Boy) and pug dogs. Despite her fear of being eaten by sharks, she is planning to learn to surf while in Kona next week.

Welcome aboard, Racy. You'll find all her posts under the Prisoner Re-entry link in the right column. If there are specific topics related to prisoner re-entry that you'd like to read about, please let Racy know in by commenting below.

How foundations are using new web technologies

The current Chronicle of Philanthropy has four articles all about how foundations are experimenting with new interactive web tools to tell their stories and share knowledge. They're posting videos, creating online radio shows and inviting readers to comment and react. They're also offering readers ways to act on what they've learned. Read the main article here; the article about how one small foundation is making itself heard is here.

At this stage, a lot of what these foundations are doing is experimentation by trial and error to find out what will work - and what won't. In that way they're right on pace with the newspaper industry and even with television and movies. No one really knows how these technologies will develop and what will turn out to be the next must-have tool. Remember the days before e-mail? Can you imagine life without it now?

What foundations are learning is that they can't be left behind. They have to try out new ideas and be willing to fail, if they're going to have an impact in a rapidly changing world.

We're in the same boat in workforce development. We need to do some experimentation of our own to figure out which of these technologies will work for us. One key principle is that the technology shouldn't drive us. Instead, we have to start from our overall goals - helping job seekers find good jobs, helping businesses find skilled employees, and strengthening our local economies.

In our day-to-day tasks to achieve these goals, how can we use tools like blogs, wikis, podcasts, MySpace pages and YouTube videos to help us be more effective? All those links are workforce development examples you might want to check out.

Web 2.0 image: Markus Angermeier

Dept of Labor responds to audit

Yesterday at the WIRED Academy in Boston, DOLETA's Acting Assistant Secretary Brent Orrell gave a response to the Inspector General's audit findings on the president's High Growth Job Training Initiative that's worth reading:

The Inspector General at the Labor Department issued a report yesterday that was very critical of number of our grantees under the High Growth Initiative.  The key issue they cited was the lack of measurable outcomes demonstrating that these projects constituted promising practices. 

We disagreed forcefully with the IG's conclusions and stand behind the Department's High Growth investments as a prudent and successful program to expand the opportunities for American workers.

Nevertheless, the focus of the IG's audit should put all of our WIRED regions on notice.  WIRED has always been about more than just training figures.  But with that flexibility and focus on innovation comes an increased risk that the auditors and investigators that follow us will question the use of funds. 

Many of you focused on the common performance measures as a way to protect against that risk and that is certainly one component of demonstrating value.  But many of the projects that you have undertaken do not easily lend themselves to judgment from the common measures.  That is why the individual metrics that you developed are so critical to capturing the overall importance and impact of these investments. 

So please bear in the mind that while we consider the sustainability of your projects and the long term success of your regions the best indicators of success, there are others that are going to ask direct and difficult questions about your use of taxpayer dollars and the products, results, and value that was received from them.  The ETA leads and our grants office will obviously be more than willing to help on areas where you have questions.

As an evaluator, I second Orrell's comment about the importance of developing individual outcome measures that capture the unique value and impact of any project or program. Certainly, limited funding and intense public scrutiny often cause public officials to stick with the tried, true and safe, at the expense of innovation and creativity in program design. (If only DOLETA could be a bit more flexible and creative with the common performance measures!)

You can read the full text of Orrell's remarks at the Academy here (registration required), and DOLETA's response to the audit is reprinted in full at the end of the OIG's report.

Audit questions effectiveness, oversight of president's labor initiative

Everybody hates to be audited, whether by the Internal Revenue Service, Office of Management and Budget or Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration has just been given a not-so-clean bill of health by their OIG.

As the Washington Post reported yesterday (and the Chronicle of Higher Ed blog picked up), the Inspector General at DOL has just completed a second audit (read it here) on the president's High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGJTI), administered by ETA's Business Relations Group. Like the first audit, this one finds lots of room for improvement. The title tells the tale: Selected HGJTI Grants: Value Not Demonstrated.

A few highlights from the new report:

• 87% of all 157 HGJTI grants awarded ($271 million total) between June 2001 and March 2007 were awarded through non-competitive processes;
• Of the ten grants audited in detail, five included a training component; and
• Four of the nine grants that included leveraged funds as part of their proposals could not demonstrate that $20.5 million promised had been provided.

The Inspector General also found fault with ETA's approach on outcomes for these grants. Of the ten grants they audited,

• Seven of the ten grantees did not meet all of their objectives;
• Six of the ten grantees did not have clearly defined objectives so their success or failure cannot be measured.

As a result, they conclude ETA has promoted products and activities as successful even in cases where it is not possible to know if they met their goals. The OIG describes these findings as "in conflict with the President's mandate that agencies be 'citizen-centered' and 'results-oriented.'"

With a lame duck president in his final months in office, an audit report on his HGJTI might seem a moot point. As much as anything, it's the media coverage we have to look out for. Here's how the Post is reporting it:

"This report reveals a double insult for American taxpayers -- not only did the Bush administration's Labor Department handpick the organizations to receive DOL grants, but many of those organizations failed to deliver measurable results," [Iowa Sen. Tom] Harkin said.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed points out that "criticism in the report appears more aimed at poor oversight and lax accountability measures from the Labor Department than at the recipients themselves."

What does this mean to local workforce boards, one-stops, community colleges and nonprofits providing workforce development services? Is this a surprise, or business as usual? Do you think DOL has gotten a fair shake from its Inspector General, or not? 

The Governator joins the call to extend unemployment benefits

Last week California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the call for Congress to pass HR 4934, which would extend unemployment (UI) benefits for people who've been out of work for more than six months. Earlier in April New York Governor David Paterson wrote to Congress urging passage of the bill.

In his letter Schwarzenneger points out

Federal funding for unemployment insurance administration has not been adjusted for inflation since 1995.  For the last three years alone, the federal funding shortfall to states is approaching $1 billion.  For fiscal year 2008, the national UI administrative funding appropriation has been reduced by an estimated $110 million.  Roughly $30 million would have come to serve unemployed workers in California.

You can read the full text of the governor's letter and press release here.

The National Employment Law Project has calculated that every dollar of unemployment benefits paid out boosts the economy by $2.15.

For more on unemployment insurance and the emergency extension, click here.

Unemployment lines image source

Welcome to the new and improved Workforce Developments

Yes, this is your same old favorite blog, redesigned and easier to read.

If you're looking for the blogroll, it grew so big that I've given it its own page, right here. You'll find a link to The Blogroll Page in the right column. I've also trimmed down the number of categories that appear on the front page - the most popular and my personal favorites are highlighted under the Best of Workforce Developments. Others can be found by clicking the category names under each post.

Want to find out if I've blogged about a topic you're interested in? Try out the yellow Blogbar box. It will search through everything ever written here at Workforce Developments.

If this is your first visit to Workforce Developments, click over to the For First Time Visitors page. Find out more about me on the About page. For even more, visit my consulting business website.

Questions or comments about the redesign? Having trouble finding what you're looking for? Comment below or email me.

What do women want?

High paying jobs with good benefits, of course. Which is what the WANTO grant is all about.

Up to $1 million will be granted to three partnerships between community-based organizations and registered apprenticeship programs "to conduct innovative projects to improve the recruitment, selection, training, employment, and retention of women in apprenticeships in the construction industry."

Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) Grants are jointly administered by DOLETA's Office of Apprenticeship and the Women's Bureau. Some important links:

Summary of the solicitation (#SGA/DFA PY 07-08), 
Federal register announcement,
2007 awardees,
WANTO awardees from 1994-1999.

Proposals must be submitted by June 6, 2008.

Does it pay to work so hard?

Monday I posted about the Top ten hardest working countries in the world, according to OECD's Factbook 2008 data. I've looked a little closer at the data and asked the question, Does it pay to work so hard?

Take a look at these two tables, both built from data in the Factbook. The first lists the top ten countries according to how many hours the average employee works, and shows the gross national income per capita for each. In all of these countries, the average employee works more than the overall OECD average of 1,777 hours per year:

In this second table, the top ten countries with the highest gross national income per capita are listed in order, along with the number of hours worked, per worker per year:

In all but one of these countries, the average hours worked is less than the OECD average of 1,777 per worker per year. And yet, gross national income per capita is higher than all but one of the hardest working countries in the first table. In fact, only one country appears on both tables, the United States. The disconnect between hours worked and per capita income is striking. Clearly, something more than just hard work creates wealth in the wealthier OECD countries. 

No, this data doesn't take into account income distribution within countries. However, as labor markets become ever more globalized, more workers may find themselves making decisions about where they want to work based on this kind of information. If I could work less and earn more - perhaps significantly more - by moving across a border or two, I just might think it's worthwhile.

Making change at Workforce Developments

Last month I celebrated two years online at Workforce Developments. I think it's time to shake things up a bit around here.

Over the next few weeks I'll be making some changes on the blog. The first one is already up - scroll down the page and follow the right column. I've added a Google news feed for "workforce development." If you're looking to find out where workforce development is being covered in the news, this is one good source.

Next week you'll see the most visible change. I'll roll out a major web page redesign with new colors, new layout and a bright new banner across the top.

Then, next month, Racy Ming of the Marin Employment Connection, the local One-Stop in Marin County, California, will be joining the blog with a regular monthly post on Prisoner Re-entry issues.

Content-wise, Workforce Developments will remain much the same - several posts each week on what's happening in the workforce development world, with an emphasis on interesting data and analysis, some of my favorite programs, and emerging new ideas in the field. If you have any comments about the changes you're seeing, or if there's anything you'd like to see covered on the blog, please let me know.

Top ten hardest working countries in the world

And the winner is... Korea, where the average employee worked 2,357 hours per year in 2006.

By comparison, American workers clocked in at an average of 1,797 hours per year, down 2% from 1,832 hours per worker per year in 1996. That ranks us #9 in the world. In other words, the average Korean works 560 hours per year more than the average American; 70 more 8-hour days, or 14 more 40-hour weeks.

For another comparison, a 40 hour work week adds up to 2,080 hours per year.

Here's the full top ten list (hours per worker per year):

1. Korea (2,357)
2. Greece (2,052)
3. Czech Republic (1,997)
4. Hungary (1,989)
5. Poland (1,985)
6. Turkey (1,918)
7. Mexico (1,883)
8. Italy (1,800)
9. United States (1,797) 
10. Iceland (1,794)

The new Factbook 2008 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) offers a host of other data on labor, productivity, public finance, environment, quality of life and more. The OECD "uses its wealth of information on a broad range of topics to help governments foster prosperity and fight poverty through economic growth and financial stability." It's made up of 30 member countries, and is one of the world's largest sources of comparable economic and social statistics.

This table shows how how all 30 OECD countries compare:

Korean worker photo: AP, via Daylife