As The Workplace Inc. won a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to train veterans for green jobs, Congress continued work on reauthorizing a bill to free up more money for the Bridgeport-based workforce investment board and others like it.
The Workplace award is part of the Labor Department”™s Veterans”™ Workforce Investment Program and goes toward efforts to provide military veterans in southern Connecticut with green jobs training, one of 22 grants nationally that total more than $9 million in funding. Some 4,000 U.S. veterans will receive counseling, classroom or on-the-job training in green jobs, placement assistance and follow-up services.
First passed in 1998 during the Clinton administration as a replacement for the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982, the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) was conceived as a way to get businesses to participate by including them on workforce investment boards. The federal law that authorizes funds for workforce investment boards is currently up for reauthorization. Earlier this year, a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee held a hearing in Albany, N.Y., as it gathered testimony from across the nation on the law.
Each board is given wide latitude to develop programs and seek funding, whether from federal, state or private sources. For instance, in response to the housing crisis the Workplace developed the Mortgage Crisis Job Training Program to provide emergency career training to homeowners at risk of foreclosure; then successfully lobbied the Connecticut General Assembly for $1.3 million in funding to support the program in the current fiscal year. To date, the program has referred 3,000 homeowners for career training.
And the Workplace successfully won a $5 million Labor Department grant in 2007 to form WIRED CT-NY Talent for Growth, which is pursuing several career development initiatives in conjunction with peer work force investment boards in Westchester County, N.Y.
“Statewide there are 12,000 people who have just exhausted 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, and every week from now on approximately another 200 people will be added,” said Joe Carbone, CEO of The Workplace, in an update last month on the organization”™s activities. “Our preliminary data indicates that more than half this group is over age 50. After almost two years without work, and after what we know is a very discouraging prolonged job search, it”™s likely that these people need to look at ”˜re-careering”™ ”“ a significant change in focus and skills. We are working hard with our partners on a response, putting together resources to help.”
Among other initiatives this year, The Workplace launched a website for its new Blue Green Research Institute, which helps work force entities research and write grants for various programs, including in the green-jobs sector.
The growth of the installed base of wind power has also spurred unprecedented demand for skilled workers who can operate and maintain wind projects, according to Thomas Quick, human resources leader in the GE Energy subsidiary of Fairfield-based General Electric Co., who testified at a March hearing in New York on WIA reauthorization. Those are long-term jobs lasting the full 20-year lifetime of a wind farm, Quick added, and he said the educational infrastructure does not exist to support that opportunity.
“I think that the Workforce Investment Act needs to consider where it spends its money,” Quick said. “If it spends its money across all community colleges or technical colleges across the U.S., it may not getting it biggest bang for the dollars spent. I think current educational institutions that already have a technical degree program are probably best prepared at this point in time to augment that program with training that would be involved in the renewables industry.”
