The Morning Journal brought a lot of bad news to the residents of Lorain, Ohio, this past December. Layoffs at a major steel company, at a trucking company, and throughout the county government. And, of course, Ford Motor Company, a major local employer, was in turmoil.
One bittersweet bit of news arrived that month, too: A donor gave $50,000 to Lorain County Community College to help all those laid-off workers find their way to new jobs.
The college joined with the local work-force-development agency to combine the donation with money already provided for retraining through the federal Workforce Investment Act. And in January, they started the “Make Your Layoff Pay Off” program.
The partners held information sessions across the county. To participate in the program, workers were required to go through career counseling, including workshops, online assessments, and one-on-one sessions. There were some tough conversations, says Mary B. Murphy, manager of adult transitions at Lorain.
A lot of people, she says, were interested in nursing because they had heard that it paid well, but many of them either didn’t have the temperament for the profession or tested into the most-basic remedial math classes. The latter students would have taken forever, Ms. Murphy says, to earn associate degrees—even assuming they could eventually meet the requirements of the nursing program. Counselors advised them to work first toward certificates as nursing aides.
Getting a $20,000-a-year job in just months is worth more to many students than waiting years for a $45,000-a-year job. Besides, Ms. Murphy says, certificates can set students on a path toward two-year degrees.
Such a “career pathways” approach is supported by many researchers studying how best to build a modern work force. “Most adults have families, often mortgages,” says Julian L. Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center, a nonprofit research group in New York that works with states. “The more you move up the chain to adulthood, the harder it is to attend full time.”
Colleges, Mr. Alssid says, also must not disregard what potential students were doing before they lost their jobs. What skills, credentialed or not, do they already have? How can they quickly build on them?
Lorain’s program focuses on three high-growth fields in the region—advanced manufacturing, health care, and information technology. But the college is flexible with would-be students. Sometimes staff members even advise people to get training somewhere else.
“Our counselors need to know that if we don’t offer what’s best for the students, they need to tell them where to go,” Ms. Murphy says. “We’ve never done that before. It’s taboo. You don’t refer people out.”
So far, Lorain’s new program has provided counseling to more than 1,000 students. In the spring, 176 of them began job training, paid for by the donation, extra aid from the college, federal work-force money, and in some cases Pell Grants. In one semester, the college and work-force agency spent about $450,000 on the training.
They renamed the program Stimulate Your Career this fall and are supporting it with $1.2-million from the federal economic-stimulus package. Ms. Murphy expects to see far more participants this semester than in the spring, in part because enrollment for certain courses was already closed when the program started, in January.
The college has also created three short-term, intensive academies in wind-turbine technology, industrial-computing applications, and information-systems support. Those programs, which will run until May, offer certificates that will qualify students for entry-level work in those fields. If they choose to pursue associate degrees, the credits they earned will apply.
The academies, which can accommodate about 15 students each, are paid for by the work-force agency and are open only to people in the Stimulate Your Career program. Judging from her e-mail in box, Ms. Murphy says, they will be full.
