Joe Training...more wasted money

Hundreds of thousands train for nonexistent jobs
Unemployed find federally funded programs aren’t solving problems

NEW YORK — In what was beginning to feel like a previous life, Israel Valle had earned $18 an hour as an executive assistant to a designer at a prominent fashion label. Now, he was jobless and struggling to find work. Updating his skills seemed like the ticket.

It was February 2009, and the city work force center in Brooklyn was jammed with hundreds hungry for paychecks. His caseworker urged him to take advantage of classes financed by the federal government, which had increased money for job training. Upgrade your skills, she counseled. Then she could arrange job interviews.

More than a year later, Valle remains among the record 6.8 million Americans who have been officially jobless for six months or longer. He recently applied for welfare.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work. That has intensified skepticism about training as a curative for unemployment.

Even before the recession created the bleakest job market in more than a quartercentury, job training was already producing disappointing results.

A study conducted for the Labor Department tracking the experience of 160,000 laid-off workers in 12 states between the middle of 2003 and 2005 — a time of economic expansion — found that those who went through training wound up earning little more than those who did not, even three and four years later. “Overall, it appears possible that ultimate gains from participation are small or nonexistent,” the study concluded....

...Some accuse the administration of leaning on training to convey false reassurance that a fix is under way, while declining to create jobs en masse via public spending.

“It’s such an ugly situation that job training can’t solve it,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a job-training expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group, and a former commissioner of the Occupational Safety and Health ReviewCommission.

“When you have five people employed for every vacancy, you can train all the people you want, and unfortunately only one-fifth of the people will get hired. Training doesn’t create jobs.”

Thanks....a bureaucrat finally gets something straight. Unless something has work and is willing to pay someone to do it, jobs won't be created...even if they are trained!

Over the past 18 months, the Obama administration has embraced more promising approaches to training focused on faster-growing areas such as renewable energy and health care...

The Obama administration argues that expanded job training has already delivered success.

No surprise there...as Reagan said about liberals, “They know all these things that are just not true.”