Here's an article exploring the issue of job retraining or the current buzz
phrase of updating skills to deep page with today's job market. In an
economy with fewer jobs, re-train for what?

Kelly



Washington Post

Friday, April 16, 2004;
Page E01


    A Difficult Lesson

Job Retraining, Though Touted, Often Fails the Test

    By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer


    After Jerry Nowadsky lost two machinist jobs in a row, watching as his
employers in Iowa moved the work to other countries, he decided to go back
to school to study computers.

    The coursework was hard for a middle-aged former factory worker who
hadn't been in a classroom for decades, recalled Nowadsky, now 49. But he
earned a certificate and set out a year ago to find work in computer
systems maintenance and assistance.

    Instead he found a job market awash with unemployed computer workers.

    Now, Nowadsky, a married father of three living in Monticello, Iowa, is
stocking shelves at a grocery store at night. He said he works 20 hours a
week for $10 an hour, making less than half the pay he was pulling in at
the factories, with no benefits.

    "I've basically given up on computer jobs because they're all going
overseas," he said in an interview, adding that he now feels the training
was "a waste, because there are no jobs out there."

    Policymakers have long pointed to worker retraining programs as a way
to prepare the losers in the Old Economy to become winners in the new.

    But decades of efforts show that retraining, while politically
appealing, is no cure-all for a workforce struggling through economic
transition. The success of retraining appears to depend on many factors,
including the availability of jobs, the characteristics of the workers
themselves and the quality of the training resources provided, according to
analysts who have studied and administered such programs. And while some
workers may thrive after retraining, many others do not.

    Nowadsky's experience illustrates one of the reasons such efforts have
often failed. The extra training doesn't help if the jobs aren't there in
the new industry.

    U.S. businesses slashed millions of jobs from their payrolls during the
2001 recession and much of the uneven recovery that followed. The number of
U.S. jobs has been rising since August, and bumped up sharply last month.
But the total number of U.S. jobs remains 2 million lower than it was three
years ago, when it peaked before the recession began.

    President Bush has proposed reorganizing federal worker retraining
programs and using $250 million a year to help community colleges prepare
workers for jobs in industries with identified labor shortages, such as
health care, construction, biotechnology and aerospace.

    "We're not training enough people to fill the jobs of the 21st
century," Bush said last week, discussing his proposal during an appearance
at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. "There is a skills gap.
And if we don't adjust quickly . . . and if we don't properly use our
community colleges, for example, we're going to have a shortage of skilled
workers in the decades to come."

    Job training advocates have welcomed the president's recent enthusiasm
for the subject, after years of proposing to cut federal job training
funds. But they complain that he has proposed financing his new initiative
by reducing or eliminating other worker training programs. Job training
opponents say such spending is wasteful anyway because the programs
accomplish little.

    And some analysts say worker retraining, whatever the merits, shouldn't
be offered as a short-term solution to the current problem of a weak job
market.

    "We're awash in underutilized skilled workers," said Jared Bernstein,
senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think
tank that focuses on labor issues.

    For highly skilled workers, retraining does little to address the
movement of high-skill white-collar jobs -- such as computer programming,
radiology, accounting and architecture -- offshore, Bernstein said. The
reason businesses move jobs overseas is the pay differential -- the ability
to hire an Indian worker at one-eighth of the cost of the comparable
American worker -- not the lack of Americans with such skills, he said.

    And for lower-skilled workers, the biggest problem right now is the
lack of jobs, he said. Improving worker skills is "a long-term endeavor,
which could pay off if done right," Bernstein said, but "there is no job
skills program that is going to create jobs in the short term."

    Many academic and government analysts have found it hard to judge the
overall results of worker retraining programs because they are funded at
both the federal and state levels, then administered locally, by states,
counties, colleges and training schools, which define success and compile
their data differently.

    "Many of the measures have problems," said Sigurd Nilsen, director of
education, workforce and income security at the U.S. General Accounting
Office, who has studied federal retraining programs at Congress's request.

    But some patterns have emerged. Nilsen and other researchers say worker
retraining programs appear to work best when they prepare an individual for
a specific, existing job -- such as when a local business tells the nearby
community college that it needs to hire workers with certain skills, and
even helps design or pay for the instruction. Bush's proposal is aimed at
fostering that kind of collaboration between the colleges and employers,
training as many as 100,000 additional workers a year.

    "Training has to be for jobs that are demanded in the local economy,"
Nilsen said.

    The federal government's Trade Assistance Adjustment program, which
provides tuition and income assistance to workers whose job loss is clearly
linked to trade, offers a sample of one program's results. Of the roughly
67,000 people served in the three months that ended Dec. 31, 61 percent of
TAA trainees found a job within three months after leaving the program,
earning about 72 percent of their prior pay, the Labor Department reports.

    The TAA program served nearly 200,000 workers in the fiscal year that
ended Sept. 30, at a cost of $569 million.

    The department does not provide figures comparing the employment
results for TAA trainees with those of similar workers who do not go
through the program, making it hard to determine how effective it is. Nor
do the numbers include any breakdown by age, prior education or job
experience showing which workers benefit more or less.

    Economists argue that while America's low-skill jobs will inevitably
migrate to lower-wage countries, the U.S. economy will thrive as high-skill
jobs are created. But many of the people who need job retraining are
middle-aged, with a high school education or less, often illiterate or
non-English-speaking. Many lack the basic education needed for vocational
school or a two-year community college program, much less the higher
education required for some new technology jobs. Many are caring for
elderly relatives or children and own a home in a depressed market where
many out-of-work neighbors are trying to sell at the same time, making it
harder to move in search of work.

    Cindy Scott, 47, of Florence, Ala., enrolled in an electricians course
after losing her job making Lee jeans two years ago. "It's hard to go back
to school" after 26 years in the factory, Scott said in a recent interview.
She graduated from high school two days before starting to work in the
factory, but she hadn't studied algebra before, and "now, I'm having a real
hard time with that."

    Even if she passes algebra and finishes her training, Scott said, there
are many unemployed electricians in her local area. Scott, like Nowadsky,
was in Washington last month as part of an AFL-CIO-sponsored effort to put
pressure on lawmakers to do more to create jobs.

    Scott said she sees a lot of her former co-workers at school: "A lot
are like me; they're getting discouraged because they don't think they're
going to find a job when they get out."

    State retraining programs provide other snapshots indicating a worker's
background may influence the results.

    North Carolina, which has provided retraining to thousands of former
textile and furniture industry workers -- many of whom entered the
factories straight from high school or even before graduating -- found that
48 percent of those who completed TAA-funded programs from 1998 through
last year subsequently found jobs, according to the state's Employment
Security Commission.

    By contrast, Washington state, which enrolls many highly skilled
aircraft and information technology workers in its displaced-worker
training program, reports that 80 percent of its participants have found
work within nine months after training. The workers who landed jobs are
making close to or more than they earned before.

    More than half the workers who enter Washington state's program have
had some college experience, and only 8 percent have less than a high
school education. "Our economy has been knowledge-based for a number of
years," said Jim Crabbe, director of workforce education at the State Board
of Community and Technical Colleges.

    Crabbe said Washington's displaced workers also benefit from efforts to
closely link the training programs with local business needs, as well as
from individual counseling designed to match the student with the right
course plan and to get the student back in the classroom as quickly as
possible.

    Candice C. Davis, 50, of Bellevue, Wash., heaps praise on the
counselors at Bellevue Community College who helped her through three years
of coursework to become a radiologist after she got laid off from her state
government job in 2000 during budget cuts. Before the layoff, she was
making about $11 an hour taking photos for driver's licenses; now she is
making $21 an hour, with health benefits, taking X-rays for a medical
clinic. She expects to get a raise since earning her certificate last week
as a specialist in mammography. "I'm really happy," she said, describing
the training program as "absolutely wonderful."

    Davis said she completed college and an advanced degree in interior
design more than a decade ago, which enabled her to work for a year for
Boeing Co. as a drafter on the 777 aircraft. She left Boeing in 1991 and
reinvented herself a few times, working as a travel agent, retail cashier
and government employee.

    Davis advises other displaced workers to be resilient, saying, "you
gotta be if you're going to survive." And she adds, "forget your age and do
what you want to do."

    The current weakness of the job market is a temporary problem,
economists agree. The longer-term problem for many middle-aged, low-skilled
displaced workers is that even with training, they will probably earn less
in the future than before, said Robert LaLonde, an economist at the
University of Chicago who has studied the effects of government job
training.

    One frequently cited challenge is financing the training providers --
largely community colleges -- at a time of tight state budgets. The TAA
program provides income and tuition assistance to the worker, not the
provider.

    Bush's proposal would direct more money to the community colleges, but
critics say offering $250 million a year to train an additional 100,000
workers will do little in a nation where more than 8 million people are
looking for work.

    Touting retraining is "a political response to unemployment," said
Gordon Lafer, an economist at the University of Oregon and author of "The
Job Training Charade." Retraining programs might be more effective if they
were better funded and administered, he said. "It's highly symbolic. It's
cheap. It's never highly funded. . . . Its function is to get the public
off the politicians' and businesses' backs."

    Nowadsky, the former machinist, said job retraining is "like gambling,"
because there is no way to be sure the skills gained today will match the
jobs offered tomorrow. He wouldn't do it again, he said. Instead, he said
his family will continue to scrimp and save, eating "a lot of macaroni and
cheese," while he waits for the labor market to improve.

    "I just hope things will pick up," he said.

    © 2004 The Washington Post Company


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