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Bridging the Gap
Thousands of Connecticut residents are unemployed; thousands of manufacturing jobs go unfilled. Can training initiatives begin to put a
dent in both problems?
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Business New Haven
6/1/1998
By: Susan Banfield
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In January 1996, approximately 58,000 Connecticut welfare recipients were informed that they could not expect to receive public assistance indefinitely, and that they would be expected to find jobs. Meanwhile, the Manufacturing Alliance of Connecticut (MAC) has estimated that approximately 12,000 jobs have recently gone unfilled in the manufacturing sector due to lack of qualified people to hire.
People in need of jobs. Jobs not impossibly highly skilled going begging.
“This can create a real win-win for Connecticut,” says MAC director Frank Johnson. The question remains, however: How do we bridge the gap? Or, as Johnson puts it: “Reforming welfare was one step toward creating a workforce. Now you have to transition these people into the jobs that are out there.”
The Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) recognized the importance of this early on. In early 1996 CBIA received a $900,000, 13-month grant from the state's Department of Social Services to do research into ways in which businesses could be more involved in helping people make the transition from welfare to work.
CBIA used the funds to do research into methods that had worked for other states, to study the ways in which various public agencies worked - or didn't work - together to place people in jobs, and to conduct other related studies and surveys.
Perhaps most important, the funds were also used to set up ten pilot projects to test various strategies that might be used to place welfare recipients in existing jobs. A number of these specifically targeted the manufacturing sector, and their results, while small in scale, have been heartening.
One program initially set up as part of the CBIA project was the Automatic Screw Machine Operator Program put on by Waterbury Adult Education and Waterbury Youth Services.
“A survey done by the Naugatuck Valley Project determined that there were approximately 200 openings in the [Waterbury-area] screw machine industry,” says Mike Cooper, school-to-career facilitator for Waterbury Adult Continuing Education.
Representatives from the industry worked with the adult ed staff to put together the program. The industry supplied the equipment, interviewed the instructors (“All hands-on instructors are right from industry,” Cooper adds, “still employed or retired”), and helped devise the curriculum.
The program consisted of 180 hours of training. In addition to industry-specific training, basic elements of the work ethic were also stressed. “They punch a time clock,” says Cooper. “If they're late more than two times or absent without calling, they're asked to leave. One of the major complaints we receive from industry is people don't show up.”
In all, the initial pilot for the program provided training for 23 welfare recipients, with child care and transportation furnished by Waterbury Youth Services. Seventeen of those who went through the program were successfully placed. The pilot was so well-received by the business community that other groups of manufacturers soon got together to help organize similar programs for their industries.
Now Waterbury Adult Education's Technical Training Center runs programs for eyelet operators and cold header machine operators, as well as for screw machine operators. “We respond directly and expeditiously to manufacturers,” notes Cooper.
Employers who have hired people from the Waterbury programs seem genuinely pleased. “We're more than happy with the results,” says John Petro, owner of the Swiss screw machine company, Ville Swiss Automatics, of Waterbury.
“This has been better for us than any state or Department of Labor program,” he adds. “When we need someone, we always look to the school first.”
Petro, whose company has 15 employees, has hired three screw machine program graduates. While one of these lasted just two weeks, another has been with Ville Swiss for more than two years.
Mark Eyelet, a Wolcott eyelet manufacturer, has hired six program graduates. Of these, three are still with the company. “All are doing very well,” reports Sandy Booth, Mark's HR manager. “Every time I have openings, that's one of the first places I call,” she adds.
Another approach to training workers for open manufacturing positions is to subsidize on-the-job training for carefully selected candidates. This approach was the one used in the CBIA-sponsored pilot program conducted by the Bristol Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with a number of area manufacturers.
Twenty-five displaced workers were matched up with local employers, who were paid part of the workers' salary for four months in exchange for providing them with on-the-job training.
“We had one individual,” recalls Dave Smith, manufacturing engineer at Barlow Metal Stamping in Bristol. “Everything turned out successfully. We were contemplating training ourselves, anyway, but it's expensive.”
In addition to the CBIA grant pilots, several other programs have recently been launched around the state with the same objective: helping the unemployed to be able to land some of the numerous jobs in manufacturing.
In New Haven, the Regional Workforce Development Board, together with the state's Department of Labor and the Enterprise Community project, ran a manufacturing training program with a curriculum developed by professionals from Sargent, Fire-Lite Alarm and other area companies. “All graduates are now gainfully employed in manufacturing,” says Kymbel Branch, One Stop Center coordinator for the Regional Workforce Development Board.
The board also places people who come to them in a program run by Gateway Community College in Manufacturing Precision Training. The program was developed in direct response to employer needs. Although normally applicants must pay for the Gateway training, the Workforce Development Board pays tuition for those applicants whom it sends to the program.
In the Hartford area community colleges, in conjunction with the Hartford Growth Council, are also running a precision machine training program. Here, as elsewhere, the curriculum was designed by a group of manufacturers. In this program, however, students' tuition is paid by the Millennium project - that is, Millennium will reimburse the colleges when the students get jobs, providing a stiff incentive for the colleges to do their job.
There were approximately 500 applicants for the first session of the program. Only 120 of these could be accepted. So far none has been placed, as the first session has not yet ended. “We have very high hopes for placement” however, says Rie Poirier, spokesperson for the Hartford Growth Council.
The common element in the demonstrated success of all these programs is the heavy involvement of local manufacturers - designing curricula, training instructors, providing equipment. “Training is best when it's in direct response to employer needs,” says Christine Reardon, Planning and Evaluation Manager for the Regional Workforce Development Board.
“The programs that are out there and succeeding have come to be because of the participation of industry,” adds MAC's Johnson.
Despite their proven track record, there are problems with the whole process of training for manufacturing jobs that remain to be worked out. Only one is specific to the programs themselves: the need for more stringent drug-testing of potential participants.
As most companies now require drug-testing of all employees, it behooves training programs to require the same of their applicants. A number of workers have successfully completed existing training programs only to remain unhired because of failure to pass employer drug tests.
Other problems are more universal, and thus less easily addressed. Chief among these is the poor reputation manufacturing has among workers nowadays. “It's not a high volume of people we see interested in manufacturing at all,” says Branch. “They think of smokestacks, dirt. It becomes a hard sell.”
“It's too bad for us as a society that we've turned so many people away from manufacturing,” adds MAC's Johnson. “Most people in Connecticut, ask them what their parents did, you find out their fathers were in manufacturing. They managed to raise a family. These are not low-paying, low-prestige-type jobs.” This message has to be gotten out there, however.
Another difficulty CBIA found in its research is that better communication needs to be established between the business community and the various agencies which run training programs. “Despite significant efforts on the part of state agencies to meet employer hiring and training needs,” the CBIA Welfare-to-Work Report notes, “employers do not have a clear idea of whom to approach for workers who can meet their entry-level job requirements.”
Finally, there is the problem of keeping program offerings current with fast-changing industry conditions. “Industry's needs change on a dime,” says Johnson. “Changing education is like steering a battleship.” Also, he adds, “If you have a real need out there, the programs can't pick up the slack quickly enough.”
Still, there is good reason to hope that these problems will soon begin to dissipate and that the promise of success at bridging the manufacturing job gap held out by the new industry-initiated and -sponsored training programs will become a reality.
The Regional Workforce Development Board's Reardon reports that his group is already involved in efforts at the elementary school level to “increase awareness of the manufacturing cluster.”
“You can look forward to seeing us getting more involved in this kind of training in the future,” she adds. “It makes every sense for us to keep investing in manufacturing.”
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