Workforce Developments

Warning: good jobs ahead

Yesterday, the big-wigs got together in Washington, DC, for a summit to talk about national policies to create jobs. Perhaps it's fitting that Ben Bernanke sat on the hot seat in another part of the city on the same day and asked to keep his.

Today, folks who are doing the work on the ground to help people find and keep good jobs are getting together in the other Washington to talk about jobs too. Their focus is on what it takes to help workers get the skills they need for the jobs that do exist and will come in the future. The forum is called Warning: Good Jobs Ahead, and it's hosted by SkillUp Washington and Seattle's Port Jobs. Here's how they describe it:

Today's workers will make up more than half of the 2017 workforce -- yet America has fallen behind in literacy and other critical skills.

How can we ensure that all of Washington's workers have the skills to compete?

Join us on December 4th for a provocative policy forum, as we hear from national and local experts about how we can improve opportunities for working adults and strengthen our state's businesses.

Speakers include Irwin Kirsch, author of America's Perfect Storm, Julie Strawn of the Center for Law and Social Policy, and Betsy McKay who directs McDonalds' English Under the Arches program. Yes, that McDonalds.

If you can't be in Seattle, don't worry. The entire forum will be streamed live, beginning at 8:30 a.m. To watch, just click this link and turn up the volume.

If you have comments, add them below or Tweet them and include the hashtag #skillup. 

Forty years of failed employment policy

The Great Recession didn't create today's employment crisis. It has only exacerbated and laid bare employment and earnings trends that began in the 1970s. One of those trends is a federal employment policy based on this idea: "Get the economy right; unleash the power of capital markets, and these labor market problems will take care of themselves."

So says Gordon L. Berlin, President of MDRC. He spoke earlier this year at a Recovery and Reemployment Research Conference sponsored by the Employment and Training Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor. MDRC is the outfit that does all those excellent evaluations and research reports on employment programs that you wish you had time to read.

My recommendation: don't skip out on reading Berlin's remarks. They explain how forty years of employment programs and policies have brought us to the state we're in today, where employment policy is viewed as a "backwater." In sum, he says, "the U.S. Department of Labor has not played a central role in the affairs of the nation's workforce for more than 40 years." In that time,

• The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation and remains far below its original historical benchmark of 50 percent of the average wage;
• The unemployment insurance system has eroded to the point where a majority of laid-off workers do not qualify for benefits; and
• Funding for Workforce Investment Act programs fell roughly 25 percent between 2000 and 2008 at a time when the economy twice fell into recession. 

Berlin focuses on the role of research in identifying which programs work so that we can replicate them and bring them to scale. This is the first White House administration in a long time, he says, that's actually interested in doing rigorous evaluations and investing in what works. He doesn't shy away from the tough issues either, like the way performance standards can sometimes create incentives to serve those who are most likely to land a job, rather than those who need the most help to get and keep one.

In speaking of dislocated workers, those who have worked and have soft skills but lack specific training for today's jobs, Berlin says this: "The key is to determine the role of public service employment in a period when cyclical unemployment is so severe that it could plausibly create a new generation of long-term structurally unemployed as the duration of unemployment reaches levels not seen since the Great Depression."

By "public service employment" he means New Deal-style job creation programs. If you've been reading this blog for any time at all, you know my position on that.

This is "an extraordinary moment for employment policy," Berlin told his audience in September. That's even more true today. Since then, unemployment nationally has hit double digits, and President Obama has announced plans for a "jobs summit" next month.

It's not just that jobs are the key to our recovery from this recession cycle, but that a fundamental change in workforce and employment policy has to happen. I'd say we need to enact new policies that ensure that

• Work pays enough to live on,
• We invest adequately in proven education and training programs needed for the jobs that are available, and
• When there isn't enough work to go around, a real safety net catches and helps lift up those in need.

Green grants galore

More stimulus dollars are on the way. The U.S. Department of Labor has just announced the award of $55 million worth of grants to job training programs for disadvantaged communities and labor market information agencies, to help people land green jobs. 

Get more details on all the grants and awardees.

Green job training programs are an obvious investment in these troubled times. But what about labor market info? It's hugely important too. If we don't have the right information about what green jobs are in demand and where, we can waste a lot of time and resources creating the wrong kinds of training programs.

DOL expects to award a total of $500 million for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy from the Recovery Act. It's just a drop in the bucket compared to federal spending on the bank bailout, which I think reflects some upside-down priorities.

Still, this is only round one on the green jobs stimulus, and President Obama has announced a big jobs summit for some time next month. Maybe what will come out of that meeting is a much bigger investment in job creation in 2010 that will help turn the economy around for the rest of us.

A final post from the Washington conference

Talk about timing. On the first day of the Washington State Workforce and Economic Development Conference Boeing shunned its long-time home in Seattle to announce it would expand production of its 787 in South Carolina. The next morning, Jeff Finkle of the International Economic Development Council tried to put a positive spin on it - at least there's still some manufacturing taking place in the U.S. I don't think a lot of people in Spokane were buying it.

Finkle also said he didn't think Congress ultimately will pass bills creating tax credits for job creation to address the economic downturn. The administration, he said, is more focused right now on not digging the deficit hole any deeper.

Linda Lawson of the National Governors Association offered a different view. She said she's been in meetings at the Treasury and at the White House domestic policy office where the possibility of large WPA-style public works projects to get Americans back to work have been discussed.

In case you're keeping count, I've been advocating this since early 2007 when the problems of unemployment, underemployment and wages not keeping up with the cost of living were already clear. My new New Deal would include investments in putting people back rebuilding our education and health care systems, alongside investments in physical infrastructure. Data and analysis from Washington's own chief economist suggests that jobs are the key to the economic recovery, so I hope Finkle has it wrong.

Later in the day I went to a workshop on jobs in the health sector where I learned 

• Medical technology is creating new jobs, but it's also making others like medical record clerk obsolete
• Health care careers aren't for everyone - don't encourage people to go into health care just because that's where the jobs are right now 
• Washington state has done an exemplary job of creating articulation agreements allowing people to work up nursing career ladder from licensed practical nurse to associates degree in nursing to bachelor's degree and beyond

My big takeaways on ARRA from Heather Moss in Governor Gregoire's office:

• Efforts to stabilize the economy are either building the plane as we fly it, or trying to put a pig through a python, depending on who you ask
• The 2011-13 state budget is looking pretty dismal  (surprise!)
• Wisconsin and Alaska are doing a notably good job of tracking ARRA grant opportunities on their state recovery act websites - a good resource for everyone nationally

Finally, I have to give a big personal shout-out to David Harrison, who was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Workforce and Economic Best Practices. Well deserved!

And, as the Washington Secretary of Health Mary Selecky reminded us in the closing ceremony: If you get sick, stay home!

The recovery depends on consumer spending

That's according to Dr. Arun Raha, Washington state's Chief Economist.

Having heard him speak, I have to agree Dr. Raha is a bit of an unexpected rock star. He put a whole lot of scary charts and graphs up on giant screens around the ballroom as we ate, but nobody lost their lunch. What's more, his agency has one of the most retro-cool websites I've seen in a long time: Washington State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council.

If you remember when all of the World Wide Web looked like that, raise your hand.

 

Couple of big-ticket items I took away from Dr. Raha's talk:

• It's almost certain that the recession ended in August, but employment, consumer spending and government revenue collection are all still fragile and will lag behind.
• Unemployment will continue to rise until some time in spring.
• In Washington, government revenues from taxes will improve in 2011 but they won't return to 2008 levels until 2012. 
• The global economy is in recovery because of more than 700 stimulus packages passed by governments around the world - the policy response to the Great Recession is working.
• Real recovery from the recession in the US depends on consumer spending. If consumers don't pick up their spending soon, we're likely to see another economic downturn.

That last item is hugely important for those of us in workforce development. Consumers can't spend money they don't have, and if they don't have jobs, they won't have money. Which means that jobs are central to making sure the recovery continues. 

Those of us in workforce development know this, and we know what it takes to prepare workers for good jobs. We know where the skills gaps are. We've built excellent training partnerships to prepare people in our communities to meet industry labor needs. We also know where some of the challenges are - whether it's hiring, retention or promotion practices, or the places where the training and education pipeline gets clogged up.

We need to get out there with this message. The recovery requires investment in jobs and job training. It may require government investment in job creation. Perhaps it requires businesses to take job hiring risks. Those investments will pay off with a faster recovery for all.

Workforce and economic development in Washington State

Day one of the conference was great. It started with a keynote address from Eric Liu, former staff for President Bill Clinton and founder of the Guiding Lights Network. He talked about the power of imagination and innovation and what that can do in workforce and economic development. Couple of highlights from his talk (paraphrased as accurately as I could): 

Instant innovation isn't possible. It's like expecting apples to appear when you haven't planted any seeds. 

Expert knowledge can be an enemy of innovation. Thinking you know it all stifles imagination.

The one thing in our workforce and economy that cannot be outsourced is our capacity for imagination.

As I captured some of Liu's best lines on my twitter feed, I found a couple of other people in the room were tweeting him too - Barb Chamberlain and Yvonne Thomas.

Later in the day I went to sessions about using the arts for economic development (lesson: treat your artists as a workforce, not a tool) and how to get economic and workforce development stories into the media (things aren't looking so good there). We heard from the state's chief economist Dr. Arun Raha over lunch (recession is over, but will we survive the recovery?). More on those talks and today's events later.

If you were at the conference and learned something you'd like to share, add your comments below.

Follow the conference on Twitter

Enjoyed a great keynote address by Eric Liu at the 2009 Washington Workforce & Economic Development Conference this morning.

You can get the details on his talk and more at http://twitter.com/workforcedev.

Be sure to check out the official conference Twitter feed @2009conference too.

Creating a workforce development social network - it ain't easy

WeToo Arizona is a social networking and collaboration platform being created for workforce development in Southern Arizona. Funded by a DOL WIRED grant, it's intended to be a regional knowledge exchange to center efforts to create a sustainable economy. Rather than get more bummed by writing how I feel about the latest unemployment numbers, I thought I'd share an anecdote about our adventures in job creation.

Creating a social network is not a simple thing. I was reminded of this this past summer when my BlackBerry kept chiming with incoming emails. After the tenth consecutive chime I looked to see what all the fuss was about and saw I was getting automatic notifications that my account was being deleted from WeToo. Except it wasn't my account, it was the accounts of all the members of WeToo in Michigan, more than a hundred of them as the emails pouring into my now trembling hand accumulated without abating. I thumbed a text into my BlackBerry (of course) to my tech team:

"OMG evry1 in MI wetoo is getting these emails! How do I stop this madness?"

(They are student interns, OMG is their language, my language has been edited for family viewing).

After a few hours we were certain that it was just me getting the automatic notifications from our website, and I calmed down. We reset the auto notification functions we were configuring and the WeToo communities in Michigan and Arizona lived to see another day none the wiser. I was relieved for WeToo AZ. It's a fragile young thing, still wet from the research and development lab here at the University of Arizona. To cultivate a social network you certainly don't want to annoy people with a senseless barrage of perplexing notifications. This is life in the trenches as we fight the good fight and nurture entrepreneurship, collaboration and the cultivation of home grown talent.

Today we collaborated on creating a Logistics training program across the four counties, where the One-Stops and three community colleges have created a curriculum that responds to employers' needs. The training is free, funded by an innovative grant. You can watch us work at our node within the WeToo workplace. And when I entered the event for our next meeting, only the members of the Regional Knowledge Exchange committee received an auto-notification. Sweet!

Contributor Lewis Humphreys leads the Corporation For A Skilled Workforce's community transformation initiatives in the Southwestern U.S.

The Department of Labor wants you!

The Employment and Training Administration (DOLETA) is looking for practitioners to review grant proposals. Virginia Hamilton at the California Workforce Association reports that Assistant Secretary Jane Oates is looking to have two-thirds of all review panels be made up of workforce development professionals like you and me.

If you're interested, you'll be asked to make a pretty serious time commitment. Here's how they put it in their outreach memo:

Selected panelists must make a full-time commitment to this effort for the duration of the panel, which could last as long as two weeks. The estimated workload for selected panelists to review and evaluate is between 10 and 15 applications. Written documentation detailing the rationale in support of each score will be required.

In addition, you'll have to sign a conflict of interest statement. Obviously, you can't review proposals for a grant you've applied for, or where family members, close friends or colleagues are in the running.

Your time will be compensated, and DOLETA is looking for qualified reviewers to apply now. They've  issued a series of Solicitations for Grant Applications (SGAs) under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) for careers in the energy efficiency and renewable energy industries, health care and other high growth and emerging industries. They're looking for folks with expertise in all of the following:

• Public Workforce Investment System
• Labor Market Information and Research
• Community College Education
• Apprenticeship Programs
• Career Pathways, Clusters, and Competency Models
• Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Industries and Related Industries
• Health Care Industry
• Sector Strategy Development and Implementation
• Workforce Training and Skills Development
• Faith and Community Based Organizations Serving Targeted Populations

If you're interested, submit your contact information and a resume highlighting your primary and secondary areas of expertise in the above areas to eta.paneling@dol.gov by September 1, 2009. 

For questions or more info, check out DOLETA's recruitment memo, or contact Kristopher Turner of ETA's Division of Federal Assistance at 202-693-3605 or turner.kristopher@dol.gov.

And if you're selected, let them know you heard about it on the Workforce Developments blog!

Social media and workforce development: Will welders tweet?

With the recent events in Iran, the tipping point for Twitter as social innovation has happened. Most likely if there is a successful change of power in Iran, it will likely be known as the Twitter revolution. Throughout the world there is a new awareness of how people use social media to transform everything, from knitting to the US Army. In June, Army officials ordered U.S. bases to stop blocking soldiers' access to some of the most popular social-networking sites.

As reported on Wired.com, the order states: "The intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to 'tell the Army story' and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information, the social-media sites available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all campus area networks."

As I watch the adoption of social media by various government agencies I think: Why not workforce development?

This is the question I am posing to my community as we tangle with the enormous challenge American workers face in our rapidly shifting and unpredictable economy. Here in Tucson, despite the downturn, some employers are still having trouble recruiting key high tech workers because of skills gaps. We're creating the WIRED Innovation Frontier Arizona (IFA) regional knowledge exchange in response. This is an innovation collaboration platform intended to transform workforce education and training programs and enable them to be nimble enough to keep pace with employer needs.

The IFA regional knowledge exchange builds on the development of entrepreneurial collaboration platforms for WIRED regions in Mid-Michigan and Southeast Michigan where CSW  and WIRED partners have created WeToo, a feature rich social networking site that supports the regional WIRED goals and objectives.

The Arizona office of the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) has entered into a partnership with the University of Arizona's Eller College MIS program to create the regional knowledge exchange. The WeToo Research and Development Lab has been established to support workforce development strategies for four counties in southern Arizona. Eller MIS students are working together with CSW, academic faculty, government agencies and private sector partners across the region to launch the new online collaboration platform later this summer.

The new WeToo platform will support innovative workforce education and training initiatives across industry sectors. This is the first time the academic institutions, One Stops, economic development professionals and employers in the different communities have worked together to create joint workforce development programs. It includes a rural entrepreneurial education program that will transform the lives of many young people in our area who previously didn't have access, to one of the best entrepreneurial programs in the country at the University of Arizona. The WeToo regional knowledge exchange will support WIRED objectives to facilitate project collaboration, sharing and archiving information, creating virtual work spaces, and assist partners in attaining benchmark goals.

As we work together in creating the knowledge exchange we're confronted with concerns about community adoption of the platform and users adapting to new work methods - issues confronting the workforce as a whole. Once again the way work is done is being transformed by technology, but it is happening with such rapidity that the time honored necessity of keeping one's skills up to date is virtually impossible for the majority of workers. Not to mention those of us who do our best to learn the utility of all of the proliferating apps we download to our desktops or into our BlackBerrys, iPhones and Google phones each week.

Our task is to help workforce development professionals use technology to address this vexing problem of skills shortages in a time of high unemployment, as reported in the New York Times "Despite Recesssion High Demand For Skilled Labor."

Will welders tweet? It seems unlikely, but social media is helping everyone be more nimble in responding to the workforce development challenges at the end of the naughties. This is something workforce development professionals should be paying attention to.

We tweet: @lewishumphreys / @wetoo

Contributor Lewis Humphreys leads the Corporation For A Skilled Workforce's community transformation initiatives in the Southwestern U.S.

Resource for tracking Recovery Act opportunities

ARRA activities are so big and broad, with so many moving pieces across so many agencies, it can be hard to keep track of it all. You may be following grant opportunities through the Department of Labor, but are you aware of job training and related investments through other agencies?

There's always Recovery.gov, the official Obama administration site to track opportunities and spending. It's a beautiful site with lots of info. Many states have created their own recovery pages to keep the public informed about how they're spending the money.

Now Wider Opportunties for Women has developed a weekly scan that pulls a lot of information together, including upcoming deadlines across executive branch agencies, upcoming webinars, and reports by OMB, advocacy groups and others.

When I saw this document, my social media mind first thought this would make a great Twitter feed. WOW could provide each individual link as soon as they find it, rather than having to wait for the end of the week, and rather than having to send it out via email.

However, reading through the it made me realize the value of having a live human being compile all this info in one place and write a brief but more-than-140-characters summary of each item. So I wouldn't replace this document with Twitter, although if I had the resources, I'd add the Twitter feed to reach new audiences who seem to live their lives there.

The most recent weekly ARRA scan from WOW is below. Visit their website for more info.

 

WOW Weekly ARRA Scan

NCLR's Customer Service Initiative

On Wednesday I explained why the National Council of La Raza is engaged in workforce development and the basics of our approach. Yesterday I wrote about NCLR's Health Care Careers Pathway Initiative.

In today's post, I would like to outline NCLR’s efforts in the customer service and retail industry. Like health care, this industry is heavily Latino-dominated. Almost 15% of customer service representatives, 12% of retail salespersons, and 17% of telemarketers are Latino. Yet few of these individuals are adequately trained to meet employer and customer demands. NCLR's Customer Service and Retail Initiative was created to address the needs and demands of our corporate partners who face a shortage of trained and skilled bilingual customer service professionals.

With support from The Home Depot, NCLR created a program through which bilingual Latinos are trained to become qualified, skilled customer service representatives. NCLR has partnered with the National Retail Federation Foundation (NRFF) for this initiative to utilize its curriculum and certification for participants. NRFF certifications are recognized in the retail industry and allow program participants to demonstrate their credentials to employers. 

Most of the Affiliate organizations implementing this program offer a one- to two-week job readiness training (mostly focusing on soft skills) and then a two- to four-week specialized training program in the customer service and retail industry, incorporating the NRFF curriculum. Each year, this initiative trains at least 100 bilingual customer service professionals.

In the future, NCLR is looking to expand this initiative to the green jobs industry, as many Latinos are employed in construction and maintenance industries, allowing for a natural progression to green jobs.

For more information about NCLR's Career Pathways Initiative, please feel free to contact me, Surabhi Jain, Workforce Development Specialist, at sjain@nclr.org or (312) 523-2047. Please also consider attending the 2009 NCLR Annual Conference in Chicago this weekend. The Workforce Development Track offers free workshops on youth workforce development program, green jobs, workforce investment systems, and corporate diversity, as well as a town hall on the current economic state of the nation. Besides this, there are eight other workshop tracks on topics ranging from policy to health to women's issues.  Click here to learn more.

NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative

Continuing my blog post from yesterday, I will talk about the National Council of La Raza's (NCLR) Career Pathways Initiatives. 

NCLR is currently operating its Career Pathways Initiative in the two of the most Latino-dominated industries:  health care and customer service and retail. Today, I will talk about the health care initiative and tomorrow, about the customer service and retail initiative.

As some of you may know, 13.6% of people in health care support occupations employees are Latinos. Most of these jobs are in lower-end health care occupations such as home health aides and nursing aides. However, Latino representation in more advanced positions such as registered nurses (4.7%) or diagnostic technologists and technicians (5%) is extremely low.

Traditionally, Latinos have not excelled in postsecondary education because of a lack of supportive services available to them, including extra tutoring, English language skills development, child care support, housing, transportation, and mental health services. NCLR incorporates bridge programs, contextualized curriculum, and vocational English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs to help participants graduate from each level in the program and advance to the next.

NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative focuses on advancing Latinos with limited or no English skills to advanced health care careers.  The current program looks at moving participants through different levels of training, from ESL and vocational ESL courses to becoming a certified nursing assistant, (CNA) a licensed practical nurse (LPN), and a registered nurse (RN). Beyond this, participants are pushed to achieve a baccalaureate in nursing and attend graduate school. This is done through intensive case management and supportive services. Moreover, the program provides entry and exit opportunities at all levels of the program.

The pre-LPN A and pre-LPN B bridge programs provide extra tutoring and support to those participants who are not ready or able to make the jump to the next level.  The chart below describes how individuals move through the program:

The initiative has successfully trained over 200 Latinos at the LPN and medical assistant levels in the last three years. The average wage gain for program participants is 150%. Besides providing career mobility opportunities for low-skill, low-income Latinos, the initiative is also increasing the number of bilingual and bicultural Latinos in the health care industry so that linguistically appropriate health care becomes more available to Latinos, a population that is expected to compose one-third of the nation’s population by 2050. The NCLR Health Care Career Pathways Initiative was also awarded the U.S. Department of Labor's 2008 Recognition of Excellence Award.

Now that you know about the health care initiative, in tomorrow's post, I'll provide information about NCLR’s Customer Service and Retail Initiative.

Guest blogger Surabhi Jain is a workforce development specialist at NCLR.

National Council of La Raza and workforce development

Why is the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization interested in workforce development?  Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the most important and basic reason is that Latinos have the highest labor force participation rate in the United States (68.7%), yet they earn the lowest median weekly wages at only $545 per week.

As a result, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is actively involved in workforce development and making efforts to improve the economic opportunities available for Latinos. NCLR's mission is to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans, and it achieves this mission through applied research, policy analysis and advocacy, providing a Latino perspective in five key areas—assets/investments, civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health. 

NCLR works through its network of nearly 300 community-based Affiliate organizations in 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia to reach millions of Hispanics each year, and it has offices in eight cities in the United States, with headquarters in Washington, DC.

The Workforce Development (WFD) component of NCLR seeks to ensure the Latino community’s ability to contribute to and share in the nation's economic opportunities. Due to limited educational skills and employment in low-skill, low-paying jobs, Latinos tend to dominate the lower income strata of the economy.

NCLR's efforts focus on increasing Latinos' entry into high-wage, high-skill jobs by creating career pathways and promoting career mobility. WFD bridges the education and skills gap to advance Latino workers to more advanced, upwardly mobile careers.

To undertake this work, NCLR leverages its expertise and resources and establishes impact-oriented relationships with Affiliates and strategic partners in areas with significant or growing Hispanic populations.  Together, NCLR and its Affiliates serve as the link between local employers, direct service providers, and job seekers within their communities, and they collaborate to support local sustainability.

In my blog post tomorrow, I will outline NCLR's career pathways opportunities in Latino-dominated industries.

Photo by Jamie Grill/Blend Images/Corbis

Welcome guest blogger Surabhi Jain of NCLR

With the National Council of La Raza's big annual conference coming up this weekend, I thought it might be a good opportunity to find out more about their workforce development programs.

Joining Workforce Developments this week to explain it all is guest blogger Surabhi Jain, Workforce Development Specialist at NCLR.

Surabhi works on NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative and their Customer Service and Retail Initiative. Her expertise includes labor market research and analysis, industry and sectoral analysis, career pathways development, workforce development program management and program evaluation.

She has a master's in sustainable international development from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She earned her bachelor's in economics at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.

I'm handing the blog off to Surabhi for the rest of this week. She'll tell us more about some of the programs she works on, and why workforce development is important to NCLR.

Stay tuned.

Congress kicks off workforce funding bill markups

And so it begins.

The House of Representatives began marking up legislation to fund workforce programs in the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill on Friday. There's not a lot of detail available yet, but The Workforce Alliance is doing their usual great job of getting the word out quickly. You can read the details here or get an overview from their Federal Policy Director Rachel Gragg in this video (what could be better - workforce development on YouTube!):

Right now the bill includes golden oldies like Youthbuild ($100 million) and training and supportive services for dislocated workers ($1.4 billion) and some hot new hits like green jobs ($50 million), community services jobs ($615 million) and a "Social Innovation Fund" to scale up new community-based solutions ($35 million). Total amount across Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and related agencies: $160.7 billion for fiscal year 2010. This table gives all the details.

Read a statement on the bill from Appropriations Committee Chair Representative David Obey. TWA's brief summary of the bill is here.

Republican members of the committee are already beginning to complain that the dollar amounts in the bill are not sustainable. I'd say that in this economic climate, with national unemployment approaching 10% and levels well above that in many areas, we shouldn't limit ourselves to an amount that's "sustainable." Programs to get people back to work urgently need a big shot in the arm.

More work in Congress is expected this week, and will probably continue for some time. Stay tuned.

(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)

Can job training work without job creation?

Yesterday's New York Times had an article that, on the face of it, might have looked like bad coverage for the workforce development field. The title captured the tone: Job retraining may fall short of high hopes. 

The reporter talked to several laid off workers who've had less than stellar success after job retraining programs. Some have retrained only to find no jobs in their new field. Some have retrained for new careers, only to be laid off from that one. Some find themselves working for significantly less earnings than in their previous jobs, or less than what they thought their new career would pay.

The article cites a recent study from DOL's Employment and Training Administration that looked at 160,000 participants who entered WIA programs in 12 states between mid-2003 to 2005. The study concludes, among other things, that "The marginal benefits of training may exceed $400 in earnings each quarter." 

For any of us working in the field, this isn't news at all. Older workers who've been laid off often find themselves slipping down closer to the bottom of any new career ladder they train for. What's more, good jobs with family wages and benefits have been disappearing from the American landscape in recent years. How many defined-benefit pension plans are still left out there?

Job training can't work without job creation. And it can't just be any jobs, but jobs that replace earnings in a meaningful way. This study and the light being shone on it by the NYT is an opportunity for us to ask some important questions:

• We're doing what we can to train people for new careers, but are the jobs out there?
• Whose responsibility is to to create those jobs?
• Do those jobs pay enough in earnings and benefits to live on? To support a family? 
• If they don't, should we train people for those jobs?

ARRA (aka Obama's stimulus plan) is designed to begin to create new jobs and save the ones we have, but it's a short-term measure. What long-term policies and investments are needed to create good jobs that will last?

Job training image source: Housing Works

Growing food and skilled workers

Windy City Harvest is a project of the Chicago Botanic Garden that teaches organic gardening and entrepreneurial skills to residents. Trainees learn how to grow healthy food that is then sold in local markets. In addition to learning sustainable urban agriculture techniques, participants learn the business side: planning, pricing, sales and marketing. 

The program combines six months of instruction that includes credits at City Colleges of Chicago with a three month paid internship. 

Windy City Harvest was highlighted at a recent Urban Agriculture conference in Chicago (more info here) where one of the topics was What Funding Streams Can Support Urban Agriculture, Green Jobs, And Workforce Development?

I wonder what the answer was. 

To learn more about the program, watch this video:

Click here if you can't see the embedded video.

Readers: if you know of other innovative programs that combine job training with urban agriculture, please tell me about them.

From the Work Station to Graduation on Twitter

I'm live-Twittering the From the Work Station to Graduation forum today.

Click here to read the proceedings as they happen.

The forum is sponsored by the Seattle King County Workforce Education Collaborative and Port Jobs.

Community colleges + community-based organizations = graduation

President Obama has called on our nation's already-overloaded community colleges to play a key role in preparing America's workforce for the coming economic recovery. To make that happen, community colleges must do more to help a larger number of students successfully complete the certificate and degree programs they enter.

Right now, too many working adults who enter a community college program drop out before they earn a credential. That wastes time and resources for students and colleges. We have to learn how to do better.

But our community colleges - along with public educational institutions across the country - are facing deep budget cuts due to the economic downturn.

Can community colleges do more with less?

With budgets that were tight before the downturn hit, it's unlikely. But colleges can seek out ways to bring in new resources to support their students. They can find low-cost ways to restructure their offerings to make them more accessible to working adults, who make up the largest share of their students and whose retraining will be crucial to the economic recovery.

Here's one simple example. Many working adult students have young children. Without reliable childcare, they often can't finish their studies. Some community colleges offer low-cost childcare while students are in class. If a college doesn't have the budget to provide that childcare, it could seek out a partnership with a community-based organization (CBO) that can.

Take that a step further: If the CBO is housed in a building or center convenient for a community with high needs for education and training, the college could explore offering courses at the CBO's location.

Community colleges also can look to CBOs to provide counseling, case management or mentoring to help students stick with their studies when times get tough. They can help connect students to other resources in the community to help meet specific needs.

Let's not leave employers out of the partnership equation. Imagine earning a professional credential in college courses provided at your work site in the evenings, on weekends or even during paid work hours. Several employers located in the same geographic area with similar skilled labor needs could partner with a college to make that training available. After all, as employers cut back on the number of employees, it's likely that they will keep those who have a wider range of skills.

You get the idea: this isn't rocket science. Perhaps you're already thinking of your own ideas for innovative partnerships that can make community college more accessible and complete-able for working adults.

Airport University, which was founded by Port Jobs, is one example. It brings together two community colleges (South Seattle Community College and Highline Community College), employers at Sea-Tac Airport, the Port of Seattle and several community-based organizations.

Airport University offers onsite college classes to the 20,000 workers who work for the 100+ companies located at Sea-Tac International Airport. Through this partnership, airport employees can take credit-bearing classes at their worksite - the airport. This model has been adapted at Denver International Airport and at Baltimore- Washington International Airport.

We think that other local communities could easily adapt this model at airports, shopping malls, business parks, and other worksites where large numbers of companies and employees are located.

If you know of other good examples of community partnerships connected with local community colleges, please let me know in the comments below.

These are difficult economic times, but the difficulties create opportunities for colleges, CBOs, workforce development agencies, foundations and employers to re-think how we work together to maintain a vibrant, skilled labor force. As funding and budgets are cut, we should be very careful about how we deploy the resources we do have, and make sure we're getting the very best outcomes for the work we do. That may mean working with partners with whom we've never worked before, and taking on responsibilities we've never considered tackling.

No question, it will be a challenge. But these tough times demand it.

Guest blogger Susan Crane is Executive Director of Port Jobs a Seattle, WA-based action tank. Click below to read her previous posts:

Tuesday: Making community college work for working adults
Wednesday: The role of community colleges in the coming economic recovery 
Thursday: Community college priorities in tough economic times