Training Sights on the American Worker
While Congress closes in on final passage of a bill extending unemployment benefits, a small debate arose in the blogosphere about the effectiveness of government-funded job training programs, prompted by yesterday’s article in the New York Times: “After Training, Still Scrambling for Employment.”
The piece discussed uneven job prospects for people who’ve received job training services—for everything from machinery repair to construction—to help them find work during this recession. The National Skills Coalition, which supports the federal workforce investment system even as it works to improve it, took issue with the article. In an e-mail, the coalition wrote:
“The underlying assumption of the article—job training that doesn’t lead to an immediate job during a recession with record unemployment is a wasted investment—has elicited strong reactions not only from our members, but [from] others in the press.”
The e-mail points to a few journalists who picked it apart, including Daniel Indiviglio, of The Atlantic, and Barbara Kiviat, of TIME, who argued “that we’re expecting the wrong thing out of such programs.” Kiviat said unemployed people who bone up on skills through federally funded job training programs—typically administered by states and delivered through local workforce investment boards contracting with nonprofits and community colleges—will be “rearing [raring?] to go” when the economy picks back up.
While I empathized with the workers, I didn’t see the article as suggesting that the U.S. get out of the business of trying to train (or retrain) out-of-work individuals. It did point out many cases in which these programs didn’t work, but a few in which they directly led to new employment.
On the other hand, the National Skills Coalition is right to note that even the best job training system in the world can hardly be expected to pick up the slack when 10, 20, 100, or more workers apply for many of the available jobs. And maybe the timing and the tone of the Times piece did more than it should have in suggesting just that.
But it’s also true that the system is not perfect. Training should be better aligned with sectors—even regions—that need workers. Federal welfare laws, which undoubtedly push people into training programs they don’t benefit from—in part to demonstrate to caseworkers that they are trying to find work—need to be scrapped and rewritten. More and better child care is needed. And better efforts need to be made to integrate industry workforce needs with both training programs and college curricula.
Still, it does seem that federal workforce legislation improves the system, however incrementally, after each five-or-so-year renewal. States are doing more to sync up industry needs with training that’s delivered. And, in recent years, the feds have tried to connect workforce investments with high-growth employment areas, such as health and energy. But these efforts, however well-intentioned, can only amount to a drop in the bucket when national unemployment hovers near 10 percent.
It would perhaps be more useful for the Times and other journalists to look at whether those moves are generating successes in and out of recessionary times. They might also write about the perversity, distortion, and waste that results from our country’s disjointed social services and human capital programs. It’s incumbent on editors to allow reporters to spend more time to learn on a deeper level what’s really going on, which will inform more effective policy responses.
It’s fine to shine the light on the big picture of job training, but there are many other stories to tell—some already written, some to be written—about the plight of today’s worker.