Tag: job training

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Links: Bread Bags and Poverty, the App World, College, and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

* When Bread Bags Weren’t Funny, or, we are now spectacularly rich in ways that rarely make the news.

* “Is Snapchat Really Confusing, or Am I Just Old? A 32-year-old’s hopeless quest to understand America’s fastest-growing social app.” This describes me, and I too remember old people telling me when I was younger about life before computers and so on, “What’s the point?”

* Dubious, polemical, yet: “Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths.” See also Facebook and cellphones might be really bad for relationships.”

* “Why college isn’t always worth it: A new study suggests the economic return on a college degree may be a lot more modest than you think.” This better matches anecdotal yet seemingly universal observation, and it better matches work like that in Paying for the Party. The more I learn about college and about pre-school education the more skeptical I am of either as panaceas.

* What life is like for non-sports fans; a shockingly good metaphor.

* “American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist.”

* College students use social media to be anti-social.

* Cops murder a guy on camera.

* “Orchestra in Los Angeles gives disadvantaged youth a lifeline through music.” Never before has such a project been tried!

* “Meet the [Washington State] Sex Workers Who Lawmakers Don’t Believe Exist,” from The Stranger and probably SFW.

* Employers want better technical writers but aren’t getting them.

* “Why GM Hired 8,000 Programmers.”

* “Lesbian” takes testosterone, sees personality and ideology change. This is not the piece’s actual title.

* Robots aren’t yet taking all our jobs because there aren’t enough smart human engineers to operate them. Which is too bad: the future in which we have all our material needs met and can spend all our time making art.

* “Scientists know there are more giant craters in Siberia, but are nervous to even study them,” which may be the most important article you’re going to skip.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Department of Labor’s “American Apprenticeship Initiative” (AAI) shows some forward thinking by the Feds

We’re interested in the Department of Labor’s “American Apprenticeship Initiative” (AAI) because it uses a word that rarely appears in the education media, federal grants, or foundation priorities: “apprenticeship.”

Apprenticeship has the ring of an out-of-circulation word, like “aesthete” or “monocle.”* Apprenticeships were common until the 20th Century, when either formal education or industrial blue-collar manufacturing jobs largely replaced them in the United States. But the number of manufacturing jobs has been declining for decades—and those that remain tend to require advanced skills—which has left formal education as the primary way we, as a society, take people aged 13 and up and try to turn them into productive—in the economic sense—adults.

The problem, however, is that a lot of people are poorly suited to sitting still and quietly for long periods of time while conducting abstract symbol manipulation. I’ve written about this issue before, in “Taking Apprenticeships Seriously: The need for alternate paths,” and a rare media account that discusses apprenticeship appeared in The Atlantic: “Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers.” Apprenticeships haven’t gotten the attention they deserves. College dropout rates remain stubbornly high, and the solution favored by the feds is better college preparation and more wraparound supportive services in college (we discussed this in “Department of Education Grants Are All About Going to College and Completing A Four-Year Degree“). So far that hasn’t worked out well.

I’ve got an unusual perspective on formal education and college because in grad school I taught freshmen at the University of Arizona. The experience was educational for me for many reasons, one being that many if not most students seemed to have no idea about why they were in college or what precisely they were supposed to do there. Many didn’t particularly like being in classrooms, and it showed. Not surprisingly, only something like half of U of A freshmen complete a degree with six years. Students who don’t complete degrees get saddled with enormous debts and no degrees to show for it.

Not everyone is well-suited to the college environment, and that isn’t me being an elitist jerk. It’s an observation that should be obvious to everyone who has taught at a non-elite college. We—again, as a society—should have a viable system for training people who don’t like abstract symbol manipulation. They can learn and do useful things. I’m well-suited to abstract symbol manipulation—that’s my entire job—but I can acknowledge that many people aren’t.

The apprenticeship model and the university model should have porous borders—people who realize they don’t want to be apprentices should be able to pursue university education, and those in universities who realize they’d rather become electricians should be able to do that. Right now, however, public policy is oriented almost entirely towards the university model, to the detriment of many of those who don’t fit the model. We’re pleased to see the AAI as being an exception to the general principle.

* Though graduate school is still conducted largely in the apprenticeship model, which is sometimes acknowledged, since in a way no one really knows how to teach research or writing—they’re both taste-based skills, which makes them inherently difficult to teach.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Everyone Is Now In Job Training: The “Innovative Public Transportation Workforce Development Program (Ladders of Opportunity Initiative)”

Last month Isaac wrote about how the Jobs Plus Pilot Program show that HUD is getting back into jobs training. Now we’ve run into another odd job training program, and it too has an exhaustive name: Innovative Public Transportation Workforce Development Program (Ladders of Opportunity Initiative). The program offers funding to “to provide information, education, technical assistance, and peer support to families of children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN [which I defy anyone to pronounce]) and professionals who serve such families,” just like many other federal job-training programs.*

But why is the new program being done via the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), and not the Department of Labor? We actually don’t have a good answer to this and would also ask: What happened to WIA, which is supposed to fund most job training initiative?

There’s another odd part of the program: FTA is the funder, but eligible applicants are not limited to local transit agencies. Instead, any public agency, nonprofit organization or Indian tribe is eligible to apply. This program is worth a close look, if your agency is involved in job training and there happens to be a local mass transit provider handy.

* Despite the similarities between this program and many others, however, you should declare that any program you propose is “innovative.”

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Vaporware, the Media, and the Dept. of Labor’s “Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training” (TAACCCT) Grant Program

The Associated Press is bringing vaporware, an annoying feature of the tech world, to grants: in “Obama, Biden announce $600M for competitive job grants,” an anonymous AP reporter manages to spend 746 words blathering on about job training grants (a topic almost as dear to our hearts as shocking celebrity nudes is to Us Weekly), but the reporter doesn’t manage to learn or say the obvious: name of the program. All that the reporter manages is “Applications were to be available starting Wednesday and due by July 7.”

Which is completely wrong.

Fortunately, the Department of Labor’s website has a little more detail in their exhaustively headlined story, “$450M in US Labor Department grants available to expand job-driven training partnerships between community colleges and employers,” but the DOL says that the program is called “Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training”—which readers of our e-mail grant newsletter ought to already recognize at TAACCCT. (The DOL pronounces it “tacit,” though we sometimes use more colorful pronunciations.)

More fortunately still, Grants.gov actually rode to the rescue with the full SGA today: “Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program.” There are 50 grants available with grants to $20,000,000.

If you’re a community college and reading this notice, you want to apply for this program. Pity that you won’t learn as much from the popular press reporting. There are some mildly better articles—like Maya Rhodan’s in Time—but most of what you see in the media about TAACCT is garbage.

EDIT: The last TAACCCT reference we can find is from 2011, when it appeared in our e-mail newsletter; that year even had $500 million available, but the RFP for this year actually says $450 million available.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Job Training Grants are the Church of What’s Happening Now: State of the Union and CA Career Pathways

Although I gave up watching State of the Union speeches about 20 years ago—they’re always boring and bombastic—this year’s rendition included a hearty endorsement of federal job training efforts. President Obama observed that, with more than 30 existing discretionary federal job training programs, the subject is bit confusing, and he detailed Uncle Joe Biden to study the matter with an aim toward simplifying things.

Call me cynical, but I have zero confidence that our VP can or will simplify job training programs. I wrote my first job training proposal 40 years ago, when I worked for Mayor Bradley shortly after arriving from the Great Frozen North. The proposal was for the fed’s first, and perhaps best, general purpose* job training program: the late Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program.

Unlike later federal efforts, CETA actually provided funding for public agencies and nonprofits to train and hire the unemployed. Although I never had a CETA job, I knew lots of people—most of them liberal arts grads like me—who got their career start with CETA. Since CETA was fairly successful, Congress, of course, got rid of it, replacing CETA with the Job Training and Partnership Act (JTPA) in 1982. JTPA was a definite step backwards, as it created a whole ecosystem of local and regional public/private boards around the country to pass out JTPA funds, which quickly became boondoggles. The idea of directly funding jobs was lost and replaced with the goal of “job development.”

Job development is like telling a teenager outside of a school dance that there are girls inside somewhere, while CETA provided the unemployed with a date with a “sure thing.” Big difference.

JTPA was such a fiasco that it was replaced with the even more convoluted and confusing Workforce Investment Act (WIA) in 1998. Despite its many flaws and limited virtues, WIA remains the primary federal job training funding vehicle. Given President Obama’s SOTU remarks and an ever-increasing pool of Americans who have dropped out of the workforce, WIA has been an obvious failure.

To get biblical, CETA begat JTPA, which begat WIA. There are also dozens of other federal job training programs. Almost every federal grant program that aims to help, among others, any at-risk child over the age of 12, young adults, women, ex-offenders and garden-variety adults, includes some aspect of job readiness and/or vocational skills training, either directly or by referral.

As a grant writer, I’m all for a plethora of job training programs. Why have 30 job training programs when 40 will do? A Wall Street Journal editorial this morning concludes that there are 47 federal job training programs, not 30, as President seems to think. My guess is that when Uncle Joe starts looking through the federal grant attic, he’ll find more than 47. The WSJ points out correctly that not a single job training program measures success by work workers hired. This is what makes job training grant proposals so much fun to write and why agencies should make every effort to get job training grants: there’s no way to evaluate success! And there’s less impetus to do so.

The states are also in the job training biz big time. For example, California just issued a RFP for an entirely new program, the California Career Pathways Trust, which has $247 million in precious state funds up for grabs. (California is also spending $60 billion on a so-called high speed rail system, so perhaps the Golden State is rolling in dough.)

Job training grants are ubiquitous and, no matter what Uncle Joe’s task force discovers or attempts to report, smart nonprofits, school districts and other public agencies will answer the challenge and apply for the huge grants that are and will be available in the job training trough in the coming months and years. As we’ve written about before, grant seeking organizations have to learn how to surf the grant waves. To quote Flip Wilson, job training grants are the church of what’s happening now.

* Federal jobs programs go all the way back to the Depression-era WPA, which focused on jobs, not training. By the time of the Great Society in 1965, the grant pendulum had swung to job training with the creation of Job Corps, which is still among the living. This is fairly amazing, since Job Corps spends about $79,000 per trainee to prepare 16 – 24 year olds for a minimum wage job. It is cheaper to send a kid to the University of Chicago than to Job Corps. If the “16 – 24” age sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same age range for our old pal YouthBuild. Actually, one can think of YouthBuild as Job Corps Lite, since it’s more or less the same program without a residential living component.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

DOL Issues FY ’13 YouthBuild SGA—If You’re A Current Grantee, Here’s How to Beat the Eligibility Restriction

The Department of Labor just issued the FY ’13 YouthBuild SGA (“Solicitation for Grant Applications,” which is DOL-speak for RFP), and $75,000,000 is available with 75 grants! We’ve written at least 20 funded YouthBuild proposals over the years, including two in the last funding round, so we’re more than a little familiar with this program, which is one of the best ways of funding job training for youth and young adults. DOL, however, has the following wrinkle stashed in the SGA, which is designed to prevent an agency that received a FY ’12 YouthBuild from applying this year:

An organization (based on its Employer Identification Number), may only be awarded one grant as a result of this competition. This requirement applies to both new applicants and previously funded applicants that have received a DOL YouthBuild grant in a previous competition. In addition, grantees who received funding from the Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 YouthBuild competition [SGA/DFA PY 11-06] are funded through December 2015 and these grantees (based on its Employer Identification Number) are not eligible to participate in this competition.

You’re a hungry grant-seeking puppy and there’s all this YouthBuild baloney in the refrigerator. Here’s how to pry the door open and get your snout in the YouthBuild trough.

Note that the restriction applies to a grantee’s Employer Identification Number (EIN). Many nonprofits have an affiliated nonprofit with a separate EIN. For example, lots of churches are 501(c)(3) organizations that have separate 501(c)(3) organizations to operate human services programs or outreach ministries. In a case like this, you can have the non-YouthBuild grantee entity become the applicant and the grantee become the partner.

Similarly, if your organization received a FY ’12 YouthBuild and wants in on this year’s action—and who wouldn’t—you can find a local nonprofit or public agency you know and love to serve as the applicant, while once again your organization slips in the partner role.

As a partner, you can still receive a large subcontract to provide such services as outreach, participant selection, training and/or case management, or smaller role by providing technical assistance to the applicant for a fee. At a minimum, the applicant collects a tidy administrative rake and the stature of being a federal grantee, while the partnering entity keeps churning the YouthBuild dollars. In some ways, this is similar to the fiscal agent relationship used by nonprofits in formation that we’ve written about before.

One one way to sell DOL on the partnership concept in through a deft targeting maneuver. Say your organization, which is an FY ’12 grantee, primarily serves African American participants. Find an organization in your community that works mostly with Hispanics or Pacific Islanders to serve as the applicant. Voila, the funding argument becomes: Let’s bring the expertise gained in providing YouthBuild services to one vulnerable community to bear on another. Suddenly, you’re not a greedy agency, you’re a hero! Such is the magic of grant writing and the knowledge gained from writing proposals since dinosaurs walked the Earth.

I know the above works, because we’ve done it a few times. For example, about eight years ago we had a large nonprofit substance abuse treatment client in a Northeast state for which we had written several funded SAMHSA substance-abuse treatment proposals. Along came an unusual SAMHSA RFP to provide treatment services to college students—but only Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) were eligible applicants.

Based on our advice, our client formed a partnership with a local IHE that agreed to serve as the applicant and fiscal agent, while providing access to students who would be the target participants. In return, the proposal included a huge subcontract under which our client provided essentially all project services, while the IHE administered the grant.

SAHMSA bought the concept and the grant was funded for over a million dollars, and it was one of only 12 or so awards made. Our client received solid funding for five years and applicant received free outpatient substance abuse treatment services for its students. If this can work with SAMHSA, which is a reasonably sophisticated federal agency, it should be possible to slip-slide around the YouthBuild applicant eligibility issue.

Posted on by — 5 Comments

Job Training Grant Programs: An Enigma Wrapped in a Riddle

Two Wall Street Journal articles on job training grant programs caught my eye.

The first, “U.S. Faces Uphill Battle in Retraining the Jobless,” recounts that sad tale of a hapless unemployed worker who got caught up in a job training program only to end up pushing a broom in a supermarket. The authors, Ianthe Dugan and Justin Scheck, seem incredulous that there are at least 47 separate federal job training programs, along with presumably hundreds of state and local job training programs.

As a grant writer, I say, “What’s the problem?” The more programs, the more opportunities for grant applications and the less likelihood that the Program Officer for any given job training program will realize that your agency has been gotten funding for the same concept from other job training pots of money. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko in Wall Street in grant writing, “confusion, for lack of a better word, is good.”

The deeper question arises: Why stop with 47 federal job training programs, when 57 would even be better? I’m not sure where the intrepid reporters got the 47 number, but I have a feeling they missed a few. For example, the article fails to mention one of our favorite job training programs, YouthBuild, about which we’ve written many times. While the article describes some of the foibles of trying to train people for jobs that probably don’t exist, YouthBuild is the champ of persevering in the face of futility. This is because the primary goal of YouthBuild, as mandated by Congress, is to train at-risk youth and young adults for construction industries careers—an outcome that has been extremely unlikely for the last four years because of the Great Recession. In other words, why are the feds training more carpenters when the country is awash in unemployed carpenters? The answers lead us towards politics, but those of us who write grants keep churning out YouthBuild proposals that find a way to explain away the dismal metrics of our clients at placing trainees in jobs, which we do through the magic of specious grant writing.

Speaking of metrics, the article also bemoans the lack of metrics in federal job training programs:

But government efforts to determine the effectiveness of the programs have been spotty, at best. It doesn’t keep track of how many people receive federally funded training. Some training programs don’t bother to monitor whether the unemployed workers who complete them succeed in landing jobs related to their training. For programs that do track job placement, the data are far from conclusive.

The above may be depressing to taxpayers, but it makes a grizzled grant writer want to dance a jig. Having written an untold number of job training programs since the hoary days of the late, lamented Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program of the mid-1970s, I know that outcomes for job training programs are wonderfully impossible to measure. Any effective measurement strategy would be fantastically complicated and expensive, since the trainees would have to be followed for years (Katherine Newman does something like this in many of her books, like Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market and No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, but she’s anomalous and an uncommonly thorough academic, rather than a commonly un-thorough bureaucrat). So, as grant writers, we just imagine the outcomes when developing the project objectives, knowing the funders will have no means to verify these and little interest in trying.

The second WSJ article on job training, “From Prison to Paycheck,” describes a very different approach to job training. In this piece, Howard Husock discusses programs for re-entering prisoners in which job training is tossed out the window entirely and replaced with immediate job placement. This assumes that whatever minimal training is needed for entry-level jobs will be learned on-the-job. Duh.

When I was a young man, I had jobs varying from drug store clerk to hospital stock boy to truck driver, all of which I learned to do in about two hours. Most federal job training programs presuppose that clients need extensive training and the ever-popular “wraparound supportive services” before entering the vaunted “world of work.”* We’ve written lots of prisoner re-entry proposals, which are larded with supportive services and training, but Mr. Husock has found several programs that seem to work by skipping the appetizers and getting right to the entree of a job. Refreshing, but I know enough not to propose project concepts like this, because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and grant writing is largely about telling readers what they want to read.

* There are two free grant writing phrases in this sentence.