August 30, 2012

Will the long-term unemployed soon get a rescue platform?

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Earlier this year, while going about their usual business of investigating the nation's power brokers and exposing corruption wherever they find it, the journalists on the CBS TV news magazine "60 Minutes" told one of the more uplifting stories to arise from the chaos of the Great Recession. The segment focused on a program to help find work for the "long-term unemployed" -- those workers, usually over 40 years of age and college-educated, who have been looking for a job for more than 99 weeks, the federal government's upper limit for unemployment benefit extensions in most states (Washington scaled back its limit to 73 weeks in April due to a drop in the jobless rate).

The Platform to Employment program, or "P2E" for short, was created by The WorkPlace, the public/private workforce development organization for the state of Connecticut, akin to Washington's WorkSource. P2E identifies the long-term unemployed who are most in need and places them in a five-week "boot camp" to modernize their networking, resume-writing and interviewing skills. After this instruction, most top candidates are then placed in eight-week internship programs at companies that are looking to hire, while P2E pays compensation to the workers for the duration. If all goes well at the end of the trial period, the companies have the option of hiring these "interns" full-time.

According to Tom Long, vice president of The WorkPlace, 100 people, mostly middle-aged workers with decades of experience, were entered into the program last summer. Of those attendees, 91 finished the program and 69 of them were placed into a work-experience internship program with an employer. As of this month, Long added, 63 people have gone on to secure permanent work. The confidence boost the program injected into the job seekers was remarkable. The sheer elation and relief on the faces of those interviewed for "60 Minutes" was palpable, even through the TV screen.

P2E seems like a godsend for tens of thousands of people in Washington state who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. However, there's a catch, and it's a doozy. The program is just a pilot project, and only Connecticut residents are eligible to apply. But there is still hope for other "99ers" in other states, possibly including the new crop of "73ers" in Washington.

The "60 Minutes" segment first appeared in February, but when it aired again earlier this month, CBS correspondent Scott Pelley mentioned that there are now plans to expand the P2E model to workforce development groups in 20 other cities. Sadly, Seattle is not currently on the list for these projects, but that doesn't mean P2E is a foreign concept in the Puget Sound region.

Inspired by the TV show, I recently spoke with Marléna Sessions, CEO of the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County (WDC), who told me she is well aware of the Connecticut program and hopes to replicate those results in the Seattle area. Last year, in fact, the WDC, the Employment Security Department and various other state agencies sponsored their own long-term unemployed pilot project called Back2Work Now, which provided intensive job-placement services for workers in King County.

The WDC program set up what it called a "job clubs," which divided the participants into groups based on common experiences, such as military veterans or workers over the age of 55. These modular groups then met at various WorkSource locations around King County to take part in a six-week curriculum focusing on job-search topics, such as self-evaluations, skills assessments, networking tips, resume optimizations and salary negotiations. The program partnered with about 30 private companies in the region, which offered expertise to the job-club members in the form of Q&A panel discussions, recruiting events, job opening alerts and mock interviews. Participants also attended direct hiring events and learned valuable information about creating online profiles and developing social networking skills via LinkedIn.

The Back2Work program did not have the critical internship element that makes the P2E program so unique, but it did have results similar to its Connecticut cousin. All told, Sessions said, about 58 of the 100 people who went through the pilot program found permanent jobs. Today, the job-club structure lives on at WorkSource in the form of regular weekly and monthly meetings, which also have a roughly 60 percent job-placement rate over a similar period, she added. (For details about future club meetings, go to WorkSource's calendar page and type "job clubs" into the search box.)

"The key here is scale," Sessions said. "We've seen what we can do with the pilot program in the lab. Now we have to replicate this on a large scale, where we have maybe a thousand small groups of 20 people or so taking part."

Stay tuned for more information about a possible expansion of the Back2Work Now program. In October, Sessions said, WDC is planning a follow-up to last year's pilot, with a renewed call to action for more private-sector employers to participate with on-the-job training programs. "Employers really want this," she said. "They have to look at the bottom line and get the most qualified folks out there. There are still plenty of qualified folks available with transferable skills, so this is a great market for them to tap into."

Randy Woods writes about job-search tools, networking techniques and other tips to help you land your dream job.

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career change, experience, internships, networking, older workers, returning to the workforce, training, unemployment

1 Comments

Prefer Anonymous on September 28, 2012 6:53 AM | Reply

It is extremely demeaning to tell senior level people that they need a "boot camp" for resume preparation when they have had hours and hours of counseling from Worsource and private career coaches on their resumes. It is even more demeaning and humiliating to put such people in "internships." People already did internships at the age of 20.

I was a 99er in 2011 and I am a coinventor of a patent from a major Fortune 500 technology company, Don't tell me I need an internship.

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