Job Corps. A model for the future?
This past week, myself and two other adult sponsors took a group of 15 small town high school students to the Flint Hills Job Corps Center, located near Manhattan, Kansas. It was an eye opening experience for our students. Coming from a small town, rural environment, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a largely black, largely urban student body. Such experiences, I believe are good. You need to see the world outside your comfort zone and, I'm sure, an eye-opening trip to rural American would probably be likewise enlightening for many of the Job Corps students.
As for myself, I came away from the Center as an even stronger supporter of vocational training than I had been before. Dedicated to training 16 to 24 year old students for "high demand, high paying" employment, the Job Corps is trying to realistically fulfill a societal need for trained workers while also preparing young people for the outside world. The students are provided with free room and board, education and even a small amount of money. In exchange, the students are expected to mature into skilled, productive workers and citizens.
Does the Corps sometimes fail? You bet. Not all the students graduate. Some get into trouble along the way and are thrown out of the program, others simply don't have what it takes - in determination and/or intelligence - to complete their program. Such is life, I'm afraid - a hard learned lesson that most of us have seen or even experienced on our way to adulthood and gainful employment.
Also, I'm sure, the Job Corps sometimes gets it wrong in its pursuit of "high demand, high paying" jobs. No one has a crystal ball when trying to estimate tomorrow's job market and I'm sure that sometimes those in charge of the Job Corps find themselves training students for jobs that end up being neither high demand nor high paying and, perhaps, are even non-existent by the time the student is trained. I was happy to learn, however, that Job Corps is attempting to evolve, to weed out programs that no longer meet the proper criteria while, at the same time, developing new programs. For instance, an office skills program at the Flint Hills Center was recently discontinued. It's pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that the secretarial jobs the students were preparing for proved to be low paying and perhaps dead-ended.
So, at least at first glace, it appears the Job Corp administrators - at least those at the Kansas center - are trying to look at the world with a mature and realistic eye. You get rid of what doesn't work and try something new until you find something that does work - a rarity in the governmental world.
I can't help but wonder if the Job Corps wouldn't prove to be a good model for a larger training system, one that hopefully would help revive our faltering economy. It seems to me that a skilled work force would do far more to revitalize our national economy than anything resulting from the hundreds of billions of dollars that our federal government is pouring into banking and the auto industry.
The Obama administration wishes to expand unemployment benefits. But for whom? For laid off industrial workers waiting for jobs that have already disappeared and are not coming back. And for how long should the benefits be continued? Six months? A year? And then what for the still unemployed worker? A low skill, low paying job? Welfare? That seems to me to be a poor investment for tax payer money, as well as a poor investment of time on the part of the ex-worker.
How about instead linking unemployment benefits to training? The Job Corps typically trains a student from six months to two years and a similar investment for older, unemployed workers might seem to be a huge investment. But we need to ask ourselves about the end product. Under the current system, we end up with an underemployed worker with outdated skills. Under an expanded training program - based on a Job Corps model but intended for older workers - we would likely end up with a retrained worker, ready once again to be a productive employee, only this time with 21st century skills.
Such a move would not be without sacrifices on the part of the worker and his or her family. Unemployment benefits, even those continued for months or even years, will never be enough to keep up a mortgage or even a car payment. But under a training program - unlike the current system - the worker would end up being a trained, employable citizen.
We all need to think outside our comfort zone. Just like the rural students visiting an urban Job Corps center, we need to think outside our past experiences. We need to realize that economies work from the bottom up and that, rather than pouring an obscene amount of tax payer money down the banking and industrial rat holes, we would do far better training our unemployed workers for the 21st century.
As for myself, I came away from the Center as an even stronger supporter of vocational training than I had been before. Dedicated to training 16 to 24 year old students for "high demand, high paying" employment, the Job Corps is trying to realistically fulfill a societal need for trained workers while also preparing young people for the outside world. The students are provided with free room and board, education and even a small amount of money. In exchange, the students are expected to mature into skilled, productive workers and citizens.
Does the Corps sometimes fail? You bet. Not all the students graduate. Some get into trouble along the way and are thrown out of the program, others simply don't have what it takes - in determination and/or intelligence - to complete their program. Such is life, I'm afraid - a hard learned lesson that most of us have seen or even experienced on our way to adulthood and gainful employment.
Also, I'm sure, the Job Corps sometimes gets it wrong in its pursuit of "high demand, high paying" jobs. No one has a crystal ball when trying to estimate tomorrow's job market and I'm sure that sometimes those in charge of the Job Corps find themselves training students for jobs that end up being neither high demand nor high paying and, perhaps, are even non-existent by the time the student is trained. I was happy to learn, however, that Job Corps is attempting to evolve, to weed out programs that no longer meet the proper criteria while, at the same time, developing new programs. For instance, an office skills program at the Flint Hills Center was recently discontinued. It's pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that the secretarial jobs the students were preparing for proved to be low paying and perhaps dead-ended.
So, at least at first glace, it appears the Job Corp administrators - at least those at the Kansas center - are trying to look at the world with a mature and realistic eye. You get rid of what doesn't work and try something new until you find something that does work - a rarity in the governmental world.
I can't help but wonder if the Job Corps wouldn't prove to be a good model for a larger training system, one that hopefully would help revive our faltering economy. It seems to me that a skilled work force would do far more to revitalize our national economy than anything resulting from the hundreds of billions of dollars that our federal government is pouring into banking and the auto industry.
The Obama administration wishes to expand unemployment benefits. But for whom? For laid off industrial workers waiting for jobs that have already disappeared and are not coming back. And for how long should the benefits be continued? Six months? A year? And then what for the still unemployed worker? A low skill, low paying job? Welfare? That seems to me to be a poor investment for tax payer money, as well as a poor investment of time on the part of the ex-worker.
How about instead linking unemployment benefits to training? The Job Corps typically trains a student from six months to two years and a similar investment for older, unemployed workers might seem to be a huge investment. But we need to ask ourselves about the end product. Under the current system, we end up with an underemployed worker with outdated skills. Under an expanded training program - based on a Job Corps model but intended for older workers - we would likely end up with a retrained worker, ready once again to be a productive employee, only this time with 21st century skills.
Such a move would not be without sacrifices on the part of the worker and his or her family. Unemployment benefits, even those continued for months or even years, will never be enough to keep up a mortgage or even a car payment. But under a training program - unlike the current system - the worker would end up being a trained, employable citizen.
We all need to think outside our comfort zone. Just like the rural students visiting an urban Job Corps center, we need to think outside our past experiences. We need to realize that economies work from the bottom up and that, rather than pouring an obscene amount of tax payer money down the banking and industrial rat holes, we would do far better training our unemployed workers for the 21st century.
posted by dlh | 5:20 AM
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