With nearly $10 million in federal funding, a workforce investment agency will create a southwestern Connecticut health career academy serving Fairfield and New Haven counties.
Bridgeport-based WorkPlace Inc. won funding from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services to create a regional partnership of hospitals, colleges, businesses and other stakeholders. In Hartford, Capital Workforce Partners also received nearly $5 million toward the same goal.
The grants were among nearly $160 million awarded in 20 states across a swath of industries, including health care, manufacturing, energy and information technology. The New York state Department of Labor also received $5 million to train people for careers in health care and advanced manufacturing.
More than half of the Labor Department funding nationally will be used to provide training to people who have been out of work for more than six months and nearly 45 percent of the national total will be used to provide on-the-job training, allowing participants to earn a paycheck as they learn new skills while earning a regular paycheck.
The federal government is planning a second round of grants with applications due in mid-November.
Joe Carbone, CEO of the WorkPlace, called it a rare opportunity and hopes the academy will lead to new careers for those who are in danger of seeing their federal unemployment benefits run out.
“This is a great day for our community,” Carbone said, in a statement. “The momentum fueled by these resources will energize the health care labor market and bound to attract other supportive funds in the future.”
The WorkPlace and other grantees are required to work with at least one area employer in designing or carrying out the program.
Carbone noted the health care industry is the only economic sector in southwest Connecticut to increase jobs steadily throughout the bulk of the recession and says the academy will meet a significant need for local health-care employers. That trend continued in August, according to Connecticut Department of Labor statistics, with health care and social assistance employment up by some 2,000 jobs from the month before, and more than 9,000 from August 2010.
Since mid-September, Fairfield County”™s six acute-care hospitals alone have posted more than 250 open positions, some of them part-time and temporary jobs.
The federal funding is from the H-1B Technical Skills Training Grant program and focuses on preparing jobless workers for employment opportunities that often go to foreign workers via H-1B visas. The money is raised from fees paid by U.S. employers to hire those foreign workers.
The HHS Health Profession Opportunity grant targets people under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program with skills and supports needed to obtain employment and sustain themselves and their families.
“The federal funding is from the H-1B Technical Skills Training Grant program and focuses on preparing jobless workers for employment opportunities that often go to foreign workers via H-1B visas”
So – we’re slapped in the face:
1) when we’re told that we have to train our H-1B replacement or risk our severance pay
2) with nonsense policy that says those who trained their H-1B replacements don’t have the skills to do the jobs they once held