White House Plans Job Training Partnership

[groovedaddy]

As part of efforts to address record-high levels of long-term unemployment, President Obama plans to announce a new national public-private partnership on Monday to help retrain workers for jobs that are in demand.

The national program is a response to frustrations from both workers and employers who complain that public retraining programs frequently do not provide students with employable skills. This new initiative is intended to help better align community college curriculums with the demands of local companies.

“The goal is to encourage community colleges and other training providers to work in close partnership with employers, to design a curriculum where they want to hire the people coming out of these programs right away,” said Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Some similar employer-community college partnerships already exist around the country, generally in one-off programs. The new White House initiative, Skills for America’s Future, will try to foster more of these programs, and to certify a list of best practices for public-private retraining partnerships.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/economy/03skills.html?th&emc=th

[shraby]

1. Way back in the late 1960s there was a government run

training program that paid the trainee a wage while being trained. Can't remember the name of the program but my brother who had a young family took advantage of the program and learned welding. He has supported his family on that training to this day. That was money well spent as he learned a skill that was useful for his lifetime. (It might have been early 1970s, it was so long ago it's hard to remember exactly when.) It turned out, it was a skill that couldn't be outsourced either.

[LiberalEsto]

2. Job Corps?

It's still around.

http://www.jobcorps.gov/home.aspx

[shraby]

3. I'm not sure what they called it, but it worked for my brother.

[Hannah Bell]

8. ceta?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Employment_and_Training_Act

The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (or CETA, Pub.L. 93-203) is a United States federal law enacted in 1973 to train workers and provide them with jobs in the public service.

The program offered work to those with low incomes and the long term unemployed as well as summer jobs to low income high school students. Full time jobs were provided for a period of 12 to 24 months in public agencies or private not for profit organizations. The intent was to impart a marketable skill that would allow participants to move to an unsubsidized job. It was an extension of the Works Progress Administration program from the 1930s. The Act was intended to decentralize control of federally controlled job training programs, giving more power to the individual state governments. Nine years later, it was replaced by the Job Training Partnership Act.

Among other programs offered in the mid to late 1970's were; 1st level electronic bench assembly (EBA) - classes were held where participants were taught how to use and read a schematic diagram to assemble printed circuit boards (PCBs) to be used in early 'main-frame' computers.

Following EBA were classes in; 2nd level main-frame assembly (MFA) - classes were held where participants were taught how to assemble the first level class results (PCBs)into working main-frame computers.


not sure what the federal predecessor was; i knew a guy working a ceta job in the 70s.

it didn't do him any good, but then, he came from big money and has never had a job he had to support himself with. always family money in the background for him.

[adnelson60087]

4. How much retraining is really necessary for minimum wage jobs?

Promote real industry and jobs they entail, here in the US. Don't tell me it can't be done. There is just more money in keeping it all offshore.

[FBaggins]

5. Structural unemployment requires retraining, not just new jobs.

In the pit of a job market downturn, it's often hard to distinguish cyclical unemploymnet (of which we have no shortage) and structural unemployment. One way to tell, however, is to look at the proportion of those unemployed who are left without work for long periods of time. That's certainly the case here. More than a little bit of "we don't make buggy whips any more... you need to learn a new trade"

[Hannah Bell]

7. which trade would that be?

[Hannah Bell]

6. which jobs are those, the ones in demand?

[ashleyforachange]

9. mmmm....

How do i sign up?