Laid-off workers retrain but end up in same spot: Jobless

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-06-04-retrain04_CV_N.htm

When Todd Wyman lost his job making parts for trucks and SUVs in June 2008, he started on a path trod by millions of unemployed workers in this recession: He retrained to do something else.

After consulting with the Montgomery County job center in Dayton, Ohio, the 28-year-old decided that the something else would be welding. Industry officials bemoan a shortage of skilled trainees to replace the 10,000 or so older workers retiring each year.

But since graduating from a 10-month, government-subsidized welding program in early December, Wyman has come up empty in the search for his first gig. Wyman and job-center officials say he's competing against experienced welders in a still-wounded southwestern Ohio economy.

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"I'm getting annoyed and tired," Wyman says. "All I hear is, 'We're short on welders.' I hear it, but I don't see it. I maybe could have (taken) a different route."

Enrollment in job-training initiatives across the USA has swelled since the recession began as dislocated workers in shrunken industries such as manufacturing, construction and real estate retool for growing fields such as health care, renewable energy and computers. But a diploma is not necessarily a ticket to a job or higher earnings, especially with the jobless rate still hovering near 10%.

"Training doesn't create jobs," particularly as a nation emerges from recession, says Anthony Carnevale, head of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. "It's jobs that create the demand for training."

Many enrollees do land positions weeks after graduating, and experts say retraining is often the best option for a laid-off worker in a battered industry. But others hunt for months, or even years, with some using federal dollars to retrain multiple times for different occupations. Part of the problem: Though economists say the recession ended last summer, high unemployment pits graduates against both experienced workers who were laid off in the slump and newly trained colleagues. Sometimes job centers funnel too many workers into the same field.

Officials "in my system walk a tightrope every day," says Jane Oates, an assistant secretary for the Labor Department. "It's very difficult to do 100% foolproof projections anytime, but during a recession it's really complicated."

Job forecasts can be undercut by unforeseen events such as a plant closing. The promise of some categories projected to be plentiful, such as green jobs, has yet to be fulfilled. And the training system itself is beset by poor communication.

Participation in worker retraining funded by the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) jumped 70% to 672,000 in the year ended last June, Labor says. But the portion of those in jobs related to their training one year after graduating fell to 67.6% from 83.2% in 2006.

Wyman got $16,500 in federal funding to attend the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology after his employer, a Delphi auto plant, closed. The Huber Heights, Ohio, resident was always good with his hands; at Delphi, he operated a drill and stamping press. And welders' wages start as high as $19 an hour, a nice bump from the $16 he'd been earning.

Asked about Wyman's job search, Heath MacAlpine of Montgomery County's Department of Job and Family Services, says the region's manufacturing and construction were pounded by the recession. But he says funding Wyman's training wasn't a mistake: "We're not investing for this recession. If we don't have the stockpile of trained talent, we're not going to have the fuel to drive this recovery."

As employers ramp up hiring, he says, they'll run out of laid-off welders and Wyman "will suddenly find himself in demand."

Wyman isn't sure how long he can wait. He and his wife, Jessica, borrow from her parents to pay the rent, and the couple and their two children are relying on food stamps. He frets if he doesn't find work soon, he'll get rusty and "lose the ability to weld."

Eyes on health care

Other jobless workers are turning to health care, a hot sector that typically promises a near-certain road to employment. Matt Moceri of Shelby, Mich., lost his job last July as a manager for a large home builder. So he took a six-week, $1,800 course at Macomb Community College to be a certified nursing assistant, a field Labor says will grow 19% by 2018.

"I thought of it as recession-proof," says Moceri, 31, who is married with two children.

After volunteering at a hospital's cardiac unit, he landed a similar paying job at St. John Macomb-Oakland Hospital. He works the night shift, tending to up to 16 patients, including their food and toileting needs and checking vital signs. While he loved his building job, "it pales in comparison" to the rewards of health care. "You're taking care of every aspect of the human being. They have another lease on life, and I feel I have a part in that."

His $30,000-a-year pay is far less than his construction wage. But he expects to make $60,000 or more when he gets more training, possibly to be a nurse.

Yet a volatile job market for nurses underscores the vagaries of job training. Registered nursing leads all occupations with projected job growth of 581,000 by 2018, Labor says. Nursing graduates, however, have been scrounging for jobs for six months or longer in many areas because of a rare glut of nurses, job-service officials say. With their husbands laid off, many older female nurses put off retirement, and retirees came back to work. Also, hospitals have less revenue in the downturn.

Recent graduate Anita Jamili, 28, of Van Nuys, Calif., who lost her lab-technician job when her employer closed in 2008, has looked for a nursing slot since December. When she entered College of the Canyons' nursing school, hospitals were offering $5,000 signing bonuses. "It's extremely frustrating — I went back to school for two years," she says.

What's worse, some students who graduated 18 months ago are still searching and will be at a disadvantage vs. recent graduates even when the market rebounds, says Margaret Craig, associate dean of nursing at Napa Valley College.

Truck driving is considered another lifeline for the unemployed, with 233,000 additional jobs expected by 2018.

After he lost his horse-grooming job at a harness-racing track, Jason Crampton of Warren, Mich., took a month-long, $5,000 truck-driving class last July that was financed by the state's No Worker Left Behind program. He can earn upwards of $32,000 a year, a significant raise from his $20,000 harness racing salary.

But Crampton, 27, is still jobless. He says trucking firms are hesitant to hire him because he'd have to ride with a more experienced driver for three months, increasing their costs.

His experience also points up the balancing act job centers face. They've shuttled ex-manufacturing and construction workers into driver training by the thousands. Macomb County, where Crampton lives, turned out so many drivers in 2008 that the job center stopped funding classes the first half of last year, says director John Bierbusse.

Crampton plans to move to South Florida if he doesn't find a job soon, but he may not fare much better. The Broward County job center in Fort Lauderdale has stopped funding truck-driver training because of a similar glut.

Green dreams

Perhaps the trendiest new career track for dislocated workers is green energy, as many states require utilities to boost their clean power output. But many jobs have not yet arrived. Others are less than glamorous.

Ken Stahovec, 47, of Chesterfield, Mich., got government aid for a $2,000 renewable energy program at Macomb Community College after he was laid off from his engineering job at an automaker in 2008. With few solar and wind-turbine installation jobs available, he snared a post monitoring methane wells at a landfill, which uses the methane from decaying compost to run electric generators.

His pay: $17 an hour, half his old salary. "I could have held out and waited" for an auto job, "and I'd still not be working."

Some try multiple training programs. When Tyrone Madison lost his sales job at a Las Vegas car dealership in July 2008, he got government funding for a $6,000 truck-driving class. After failing to land a job, he took a solar-energy class last summer. "They said solar was going to be the next big thing," says Madison, 48.

But he hasn't found a solar-installation job either after sending dozens of résumés. This year, Madison took a third class in hopes of getting a job auditing homes for energy efficiency. But he has no regrets.

"When you put a fishing pole in the water you can put one in there or you can put a bunch of hooks in there," he says. He recently got a job as a collections agent but is still seeking a spot related to his training.

Las Vegas job-center executive Helicia Thomas, who worked with Madison, says federal funding for some clean-energy projects has yet to be released. And jobs at a solar farm being built in Nevada were unexpectedly filled by workers from California and Arizona.

Experts say much of the hit-or-miss nature of job training is rooted in a fragmented system. The guidance that job centers give trainees is based on localized versions of federal job forecasts that may be off the mark.

That's why centers also are supposed to rely on local employers' input. But job centers, community colleges and employers have separate agendas, and communication among them is often poor, says Julian Alssid, head of the Workforce Strategy Center, a consulting firm.

Community colleges, beset by state funding cuts, want to boost enrollment, Carnevale says.

Employers, meantime, often have little incentive to share hiring plans, says Andy Levin, head of Michigan's workforce transition bureau. "It doesn't affect this quarter's bottom line," he says.

Even when employers do communicate, they may overestimate their need for workers. "It's in their interest to have a large pool of people from which to select," says Jim Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College.

Also, many colleges emphasize short-term training to get students back to work quickly, while high-skill jobs in demand require lengthier courses, says Tom Bailey of Columbia's Teachers College.

Filling needs

Some are trying to bridge the gaps. In Michigan, Doug Stites, CEO of Capital Area Michigan Works, set up councils for six industries made up of about 100 employers each. He funds training only when he's fairly certain a related job will be there. His placement rate: 90% within 100 days of graduating. He concedes he's accepting far fewer displaced workers for training than other state centers.

Perhaps the key question is this: Is retraining better than the status quo? A study commissioned by Labor that compared laid-off workers who were retrained to similar ones who weren't found that four years after entering programs, benefits in earnings and employment were "small or non-existent."

One problem: Retrained workers often spend several years casting about until they find their niche, a process most workers experience after high school or college, says Ken Troske, a study co-author and a professor of labor economics at the University of Kentucky. For workers 40 or older, that leaves fewer years to benefit from their new skills.

A more upbeat study for Labor and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found a year of community college credits boosts earnings 9% for men and 13% for women. But the report said gains were nearly halved for workers over 35. Arguing laid-off workers shouldn't keep looking for jobs in dwindling sectors, study co-author Louis Jacobson says, "If you don't retrain them, what else are you going to do?"

Kevin Hollenbeck of the Upjohn Institute, a research firm, says unemployed workers have little to lose by acquiring new skills when jobs are scarce. "It's much better than sitting at home and watching soaps," he says