Is there a missing link in state job training?

TRAINED HAND: Fred Santaniello, director of workforce development and programs at NEIT, with Teddy Small, a participant in the SAMI program, who later found a job. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
TRAINED HAND: Fred Santaniello, director of workforce development and programs at NEIT, with Teddy Small, a participant in the SAMI program, who later found a job. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

There are more than 300 state occupational-skills training programs in Rhode Island aimed at putting the unemployed back to work.

Despite their number, however, those programs have not been enough to turn around the unemployment problem that has plagued the state since 2008. Even the success stories speak to the limited nature of the programs.

Efrossini “Effie” Capezza of Coventry enrolled in the patient-care technician certification program offered by the R.I. Department of Labor and Training in January 2014. The certification, obtained after a layoff as a pharmacy technician, she said, led last July to a full-time job at South County Hospital in South Kingstown.

But the experience of General Dynamics Electric Boat was less positive. Maura Dunn, vice president of human resources and administration at one of the state’s largest employers, will tell you that a specially designed DLT training program called Bridges was discontinued last November after seven months, with EB hiring only 11 people from a field of 130 candidates.

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“We were looking for skilled and semi-skilled people, and they were sending us entry-level people,” Dunn said. “There was this inherent frustration that in a state where we are committed, we felt we ought to be able to get workers using [DLT] programs.”

Should the state have been able to do more to provide a major employer with candidates ready to fill good-paying jobs?

IT’S NOT SO SIMPLE

Part of the issue in judging the effectiveness of the state’s training programs lies in the imprecise way they are measured. DLT’s new director, Scott Jensen, readily admits numbers don’t tell a simple story. Statistics reported to the U.S. Department of Labor by DLT mix information together about training programs and less-intensive DLT career services.

Career services help with resume writing, mock interviews and online job searches, as DLT focuses on getting out-of-work people into jobs from which they can continue to hunt for work that is an even better fit, with better pay.

Neil Mehrotra, assistant professor of economics at Brown University, says this role is appropriate for DLT.

“With the average person they’re serving, they’re just helping them find another job, not training them,” he said. “And that’s not an unreasonable thing to do, because the most important thing to do is to get people back to work.”

But with so many employers looking for workers, the training aspect has taken on added importance.

“We’re not doing as good a job as we need to, to get our companies the folks they need, and they’re complaining,” Jensen said. “They say all the time: ‘I’d like to grow, but I just can’t find the workers I need.’ ”

Training through DLT focuses on three categories – adults who have been out of the workforce, dislocated workers who have lost their jobs, and youths.

Still, said Jensen, “we’re not a school; we don’t train anybody in-house. Mostly, we administer in the neighborhood of $12 million a year in federal DOL grant money.”

DEFINING SUCCESS

Like other states, the DLT also offers on-the-job training for new hires and incumbent-worker training, to bring workers to the next level within already clearly defined careers.

According to Holly O’Brien, administrator for Region 1 of U.S. Department of Labor, Rhode Island during most of the past decade has met or exceeded percentage goal rates for job placement and retention set by DOL, and is in step with its peers in New England, New York and New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Yet, Rhode Island’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 5.8 percent through July, compared with its neighbors and the rest of the country.

Jensen and DLT Chief Public Affairs Officer Michael Healey affirm O’Brien’s point: when matching eligible, longer-term unemployed workers to training programs that result in jobs, along with providing career services that get the rest of the unemployed back to work, Rhode Island is on a par with other states, given a 70-80 percent rate of re-employment. But how many of those jobs are the result of a training program is not known by the DLT. And it is virtually impossible to know how successful those training programs are when mixed with career services that include online resources at EmployRI and netWORKri One-Stop Career Centers, which provide a variety of free online training resources for adult job seekers.

“Yes, training has helped lower the unemployment rate,” asserted Healey. “But I don’t know that DLT or other state workforce agencies have a precise way of measuring this.”

The data show a dramatic increase in the number of unemployed completing training and receiving services, roughly coinciding with the Great Recession.

The count went from 688 in the 2006 fiscal year to 1,347 after the recession hit and a peak of 2,665 in fiscal 2011, with a gradual decline and leveling off to 1,026 through March 31 of FY2015.

Likewise, many more people got jobs afterward – peaking at 1,842 in fiscal 2012 and stabilizing at about 832 through March 31 of fiscal 2015.

Still, Jensen said, “we don’t know exactly which interventions are the most successful. We need to start tracking individual programs.”

CLEARER VISION

Just how that happens has yet to be worked out, Jensen and Healey said, but improved measurements are being required now that, as of July 1, Congress has replaced the federal Workforce Investment Act, which governed how workforce investment boards provide training, with the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act.

Still complicating matters are federal funding streams for workforce development fed to states through three different federal agencies – DOL, the Office of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education, said Edmund “Ted” Fitzgerald, Region 1 director of public affairs.

Under WIA, he added, the use of funds for incumbent worker training and transitional jobs activities was “very” restricted. Under WIOA, the use of these funds is broadened and encouraged as part of a training or employment plan.

Mehrotra says the additional flexibility in using funds for training, coupled with clearer requirements for tracking results, could help.

Rhode Island recently received $10 million in federal funding solely to put toward Real Jobs Rhode Island, a new training program introduced in April. That total includes a $3 million bonus for meeting percentage rate goals for training and career-services completions, job placement and retention, said Jensen and O’Brien.

“A lot of workforce-development programs, not just in Rhode Island but around the nation, are not able to easily assess the effectiveness of their programs because of difficulty keeping track of it over time, and because they don’t have a control group to compare it to,” Mehrotra said.

“This is not a criticism of DLT, because this is a very difficult thing to do,” he continued. “Tracking with control groups is expensive, [and] spending resources on that would detract from [DLT’s] ability to help people. WIOA is trying to improve this measurement problem by requiring the DOL to develop ways to measure the effectiveness of the services being delivered.”

As DOL and DLT consider how to create better metrics and achieve better results, Jensen, Gov. Gina M. Raimondo and Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor are touting Real Jobs Rhode Island. The program has awarded a total of $479,000 in planning grants, typically about $25,000 each, to companies in industry sectors leading a team of corporate and other partners to create strategies for putting people back to work.

The groups whose plans win additional funding from the remaining pool of $9.5 million in implementation grants in November will put those plans into action by the spring of 2016.

Toray Plastics (America) Inc. of North Kingstown and Hyman Brickle & Son Inc. of Woonsocket are each heading partnerships – Brickle for education and training programs, and Toray for manufacturing leadership development.

Smed Blair, senior vice president for Hyman Brickle & Son, said his firm’s strategy revolves around creating an online curriculum that distills some of the universal skills needed to promote incumbent workers in manufacturing companies as disparate as Vibco Vibrators, Garland Writing Instruments and Aspen Aerogel. Other partners are the Rhode Island Foundation and the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association.

The companies are similar in that they rely on technologies that are not used widely, so training for them is scarce, Blair said.

At Toray, Lisa Ahart, vice president of U.S. corporate human resources, environmental health and safety, says the need for Real Jobs Rhode Island has surfaced because Rhode Island job candidates frequently lack high-school-level English and math skills.

With its partners, Toray will create a curriculum of leadership training that can be delivered by a third party to create leaders inside the company who can train others, Ahart said.

“DLT has a lot on its plate,” said Ahart. “Training they try and provide is more of a Band-Aid than a long-term fix, and it’s not necessarily what the workplace of today is looking for. That’s where Real Jobs Rhode Island comes in, because it’s more workforce driven, and focuses on the specific employer needs.”

Real Jobs Rhode Island’s planning grants are “employer-based, as opposed to the state trying to figure out what we need, which is really refreshing,” Blair said.

SUCCESS STORY

One “promising” training program in which DLT is a funding partner, along with the Governor’s Workforce Board, the Rhode Island Foundation and the U.S. DOL, is the Shipbuilding/Marine Trades and Advanced Manufacturing Institute, or SAMI program, said EB’s Dunn.

Funded at a total of $6 million over the past three years, EB has hired a total of 69 workers since then, said Dunn and Fred Santaniello, director of workforce development and programs at New England Institute of Technology, which administers the training.

SAMI trains the unemployed in labs at NEIT not only in welding, but as machinists, ship-fitters and pipefitters. “The program is showing promise, because the SAMI participants, [once trained at NEIT], are going through EB’s in-house training in about 50 percent of the time of other new hires,” said Dunn.

From 2013 through mid-August of this year, 199 of the 229 enrolled in any of the SAMI training programs have finished, and of those 177 got jobs, Santaniello said. The 30 remaining are still getting training, he said. The average wage is just over $17 an hour with benefits, he added.

But while there are individual successes, only better measurements and metrics will enable the agency to get a handle on its own performance, Jensen and Healey said.

CHANGING APPROACH

Raimondo affirmed that Real Jobs Rhode Island is intended to develop training that is tailored to business needs that are in demand.

“I’ve set a timeline for [Jensen] that is fast paced,” she said in an email. “In Maryland, [Jensen] put a program like this in place in 18 months, and I asked for six months and he came through. … I expect the team at DLT, and the partnerships they fund, to begin to show preliminary results as soon as early spring.”

Along with the 300-plus occupational skills training programs offered by DLT, the Governor’s Workforce Board, put in place in 2005, establishes and oversees workforce-development policy and plans, and allocates state Job Development Funds while managing a variety of training grants.

While the DLT and GWB goals are aligned and complement one another, GWB’s state grants go toward other types of training, including incumbent-worker training, workforce-innovation grants for the long-term unemployed, summer youth work experiences and other programs.

“Not everybody needs training,” said Rick Brooks, the GWB’s executive director. “[However,] training is critically important for someone who has little work experience or whose industry has gone away.”

Workforce-innovation grants, for instance, go directly to a business, school or community organization, which then provides the training to prepare the unemployed for jobs. In the most recent 2014-15 fiscal year, at least 264 of the 382 unemployed who completed training were hired (out of 507 who enrolled), with more expected to obtain employment since finishing by June 30, Brooks said. A total of 165 employers were involved in some form of training, though not all hired workers.

Asked why the training-completion and job-placement rates are not higher, Brooks said, some people find jobs on their own before completing the training program and that’s not recorded as a job-placement outcome.

By November, at the request of the General Assembly, Brooks said, the GWB will produce a Comprehensive System Improvement Plan. That plan will review how the workforce system is functioning and how it can be restructured.

Going forward, the need is, “more than anything, for public and private partnerships,” Brooks explained.

“For education and training to really hit the mark, it needs to be driven by and informed by businesses, so that people are trained for jobs that really exist and with the skills businesses really need,” he said.

GWB looks to its industry partners to make clear what the workforce needs and expectations are of the businesses in their industry.

“It is happening. It’s just that there are many businesses, and there is room for improvement,” Brooks said.

Jensen expects the more recent training programs, such as those in Real Jobs Rhode Island, will help turn around the state’s economy.

“By putting employers at the center of our state’s workforce-development system and letting them drive job-training solutions that are customized to their needs, more Rhode Islanders who need good jobs now will find [them],” he said.

EB’s Dunn says state-offered training programs can still help the company with hiring.

“We’ve hired more than 2,000 employees at Quonset Point in the past three years, and anticipate bringing 300 [to] 400 people per year in Rhode Island through 2019, when recruiting is likely to ramp up even more,” said Dunn. “Job training will provide skilled applicants that EB wouldn’t otherwise be able to consider.”

Laid off in 2012, Capezza relied on career services before getting referred by DLT to job training in November 2013, she said. Initially, she looked in her area of expertise as a pharmacy tech, but realized the demand wasn’t there.

“The training [through DLT] gave me the chance to get my foot in the door,” she said. “It was such a blessing. Having the chance to start over and make a fresh start was a beautiful feeling, because it is hard out there.” •

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