What does state get for billions spent on job training?

nor’s Workforce Council and brought in new members.

Lamont drew corporate

CEOs, academics and philanthropists into the council, an instinctive response by the businessman-turnedgovernor. Its members include top executives from

Electric Boat, Stanley Black

& Decker, NBC Sports, Bigelow Tea, Sound Manufacturing, Synchrony, AQR, Yale

New Haven Hospital, Infosys, The Hartford, Indeed,

Aventri and ReNetx.

To lead the council, Lamont went outside governIn a report to the workment and named Garrett force council in January, Moran, a Wharton MBA McKinsey had warned that and one-time investment more workers will be reachbanker with the Blackstone ing retirement age in ConGroup who ran Year Up, a necticut than entering their non-profit with a stated goal working years in 2025. In of closing the “opportunity other words, the state was divide” facing disadvantaged facing the prospects of a youth. He also is a friend of crippling labor shortage. Lamont’s and helped lead “We are at an amazing the governor’s transition moment,” Moran said in team. January. “At a time when

Lamont introduced him employers are constrained, on Oct. 29, 2019, when he they can’t find talent. It also is signed the executive order at an enormous opportunity.” Naugatuck Valley CommuniJoe Carbone thought so. As ty College in Waterbury. the chief executive officer of

Moran said the council The WorkPlace, he has made might require a year to effect a mission of finding paths for significant change. the chronically unemployed,

“Six months,” Lamont the underemployed and even countered. some deemed to be unemThe audience laughed. ployable with a program Moran proved to be the called Platform to Employmore realistic of the two. ment. It includes five weeks of

It took one week shy of a classroom instruction, folyear for the Governor’s Worklowed by a paid internship force Council to issue a stratethat serves as a risk-free gic plan that acknowledges tryout for employers. the short-term crisis of high “What Platform to Emunemployment caused by ployment has done, it baCOVID-19 yet focuses on sically goes to an employer chronic structural issues that and says, ‘Look, here is a deal hobbled economic growth you can’t refuse. You’ve got and limited opportunities for zero risk,’” Carbone said. “We the working poor before the cover wages from four to pandemic. eight weeks. They are on my

But the 49-page document payroll. It gives them a sure is really a prelude, not a bluething.” print. It articulates many of Connecticut had ended Connecticut’s challenges to 2019 with an average annual inclusive economic growth, unemployment rate of 3.8 including a wage structure percent, a tight labor market that leaves thousands of that presented challenges for workers, many of whom have employers and training opbeen deemed essential during portunities for workers with the pandemic, outside the limited skills and experience. stability of a middle-class life. Carbone said that market

“We’re focused on jobs that created a need for employers will pay living wages, middleto consider his clients. skilled jobs, whether it’s there Then came COVID-19, in manufacturing, healthcare, putting more than 400,000 I.T., business services,” said out of work in Connecticut. Mark Argosh, who recently Overnight, the labor shortage succeeded Moran as the became a glut. council’s chair, a volunteer “It sure as heck is a differposition. ent environment,” Lamont

The strategic plan is broadsaid. “Twelve months ago, we ly ambitious, touching on the had thousands of manufacroles of everything from child turing jobs they couldn’t fill, care to higher education. and they weren’t training

“We need to build a better enough people to fill those child-care system, at reasonjobs. I thought, ‘This is the able cost,” the council congreatest opportunity in my cluded in the plan. “We need lifetime to lift young people accessible, affordable transup who might not otherwise portation systems. We need to have that opportunity.’” tap the potential of those with Moran is optimistic that mental health challenges by manufacturing, which relies giving them the support they on defense spending in Conneed to enter the job market. necticut, will rebound relaAnd we must untangle the tively quickly. web of government support Manufacturers had been programs that often create sensitive to the need to train disincentives to work.” workers for five years. The

Unclear is the degree to regional workforce develwhich Lamont will translate opment board in eastern the strategic plan into legConnecticut addressed the islative action and budget need in 2016, using a $9 milpriorities. It calls for somelion federal grant to create the thing government generally Manufacturing Pipeline Inidoes poorly: Work across the tiative that provides training lines that separate agencies for open jobs. and non-profits, the silos that One of its principles is Lamont decried in rebranding “de-risking,” using public the workforce council. Lafunds to both train workers mont acknowledged last week and initially place them in a that the COVID-19 pandemic workplace for a subsidized and subsequent recession has trial period. The program cost taken away from what had about $6,000 per worker, but been a front-burner issue a the state considers the return year ago. on investment to be more

“We kept going, but not than reasonable. with the same pace and ur“Since it started in 2016, gency that I would have liked we’ve up-skilled, re-skilled to see,” Lamont said. and re-employed over 1,500

Moran stepped down once people. And in the course of the plan was complete. His doing that, we’ve generated successor, Argosh, has an over $50 million in wages,” MBA from Stanford and an said Vallieres, one of the undergraduate degree in manufacturing executives social change from Brown. He who helped develop the pipeline.istheexecutivedirectorof

Social Venture PartnersManufacturing jobs deConnecticut, a cross between clined from 300,000 in 1990 to a charity and a consulting about 150,000 in 2012, then firm, albeit one staffed by a began to climb in 2016. But network of volunteers. technical training programs

Working to implement had withered. the plan from the inside of “We had a whole generagovernment is Kelli-Marie tion of parents who lost their Vallieres, the executive jobs telling their children, director of the Office of ‘Don’t ever go into manufacWorkforce Strategy. She is turing,'” Vallieres said. “We

Sandra Claxton always worked without a financial cushion. That’s typical for the low-wage workers who perform the vital work of caring for the infirm and elderly as health aides, certified nursing assistants and personal care attendants. Still, her fall into homelessness after the end of her marriage in 2017 was stunning.

Her husband put her out. That’s her phrase. On her own, she could not afford the

$400 monthly payment on the Subaru that took her to assignments as a visiting home health aide, a job she had held for seven years. The dominoes fell fast. No car meant no job. No job meant no way to get an apartment.

“When he put me out, I was staying in hotels. Couldn’t afford it,” said Claxton, who also couch-surfed for a time before landing at a shelter. “Had all my stuff in storage. Lost it. Couldn’t afford it.”

She was what demographers at the United Way would call an ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. Of Connecticut’s

1.35 million households, about

10 percent are below the federal poverty level. Another

30 percent are ALICE, the working poor unable to afford an unexpected expense of a few hundred dollars.

A chance referral at a homeless shelter in Norwalk put her on a bus to the Health Career Academy, a federally funded program in Bridgeport that provides career counseling and tuition for eligible recipients. It is run by The WorkPlace, a non-profit that, among other things, serves as the regional workforce development board for Southwest Connecticut, one of five in the state.

Claxton is a job-training success story, certified as a sterile processing technician and hired by a hospital in September 2019 at a starting wage of $16.31, with a promised raise to $17 and the potential to earn far more. But those basic job-training data points — successful placement, and a starting wage — are not consistently tracked in Connecticut.

A review in January of the state’s workforce development programs by McKinsey & Co. found less a cohesive system than a loose confederation of fiefdoms — an array of regional councils and autonomous non-profits with varying funding sources and eligibility requirements that provide jobtraining at an estimated annual cost of $323 million.

How many people do the programs serve? McKinsey’s best estimate was 125,000, a number that came with a caveat: “Connecticut data systems are not standardized across agencies, nor is it consistently collected.”

Simply put, Connecticut doesn’t precisely know what it was getting for the money. To be fair, most states don’t. And neither does the federal government, a primary funding source for employment programs in the United States.

Based on research by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the White House Council of Economic Advisors concluded in a 2019 report that the federal government spends $18.9 billion annually on dozens of job-training programs administered by 15 government agencies, most with little or no evaluation.

With an executive order signed more than a year ago, Gov. Ned Lamont set about changing that, at least in Connecticut. He rebranded the Connecticut Employment and Training Commission, a policy board required of states in order to get federal funding, as the Govera former manufacturing executive active in workforce development.

The Office of Workforce Strategy is a new entity deliberately constructed as a bureaucratic free agent. It exists via a memo of understanding between the Department of Labor and Department of Economic and Community Development.

The dangers and opportunities of a ‘silver tsunami’

have a ton of people who are highly skilled, but we’re calling them the ‘silver tsunami.’ They’re all hitting retirement age.”

Employment in the industrial sector stabilized, and the state now was facing a shortage of 6,000 workers a year, at least before the pandemic. More than one-third of the manufacturing workforce is

55 or older.

The manufacturing pipeline has a 90 percent placement rate, attracting workers from other sectors. Argosh said the goal is to provide a career path, not just a job.

For example: Two years ago, Aaron Huntley was a

30-year-old father of two working as the manager of a Wendy’s restaurant, a job that he says offered high stress, low pay and no room for advancement. He took a chance, quitting to enter a

10-week welding program run by Three Rivers Community College.

Garretson Creighton, 32, had bumped from job to job after high school. He had studied machining at Ella T. Grasso Technical High School in Groton.

“I really liked it, but then when I got out I couldn’t find a job, and I ended up bartending and everything else under the sun,” he said. He was running an indoor gokart track when he took another shot at manufacturing, signing up for a training program through the pipeline.

They both now work for Sound Manufacturing, the precision sheet-metal fabricator run by Vallieres’ family in Old Saybrook. Most of the work is custom, giving the workers a degree of autonomy. The company uses everything from old-school lathes to computer-driven lasers.

“I want to learn it all,” Huntley said.

Vallieres, who was Moran’s volunteer vice chair of the governor’s council, left Sound Manufacturing in July to work full-time on what had been an extracurricular passion. The move brings her back to an earlier career interest. She has a doctorate from the University of Connecticut in adult education.

The strategic plan calls for the establishment of a data dashboard by the end of 2021 to measure what works and what doesn’t.

“One of our strategic initiatives is to significantly enhance program evaluation and measurement and to make the results transparent to students and job seekers and program managers … so they can select the education and career opportunities that are going to match their interests and achieve their goals,” Argosh said.

Washington state offers a potential model with a system that tracks employment and earnings of participants in various programs and measures a return on investment to participants and taxpayers.

For example, the Washington dashboard shows that a training program for lowincome adults on welfare served 16,300 clients at a cost of $45.9 million in federal money and $459,000 in state funds. Sixty-two percent of participants exited the program to a job, with a median annualized income of $21,200.

The health care sector has employment needs now. With a workforce of 270,000, health care is Connecticut’s largest employment sector. It has significant openings for registered nurses and surgical technicians, jobs that provide solid middle-class wages, as well as home health aides and other positions that pay less than a living wage.

Sandra Claxton’s experience suggested some of the opportunities and challenges facing Connecticut.

Claxton entered the Health Career Academy after filling out paperwork to determine her eligibility, sitting through an orientation about the available programs and waiting to hear if she would be picked via a lottery. Within two days, she was assigned Christina

Martorelli as a counselor and guide.

“She was the best. Any time I had an issue, she was there for me,” said Claxton, who is 57. “I was nervous. I had been out of school for a long time.”

The options in entry-level certificate programs included training to become a dental assistant, a certified nursing assistant, a home health aide, a pharmacy technician and a sterile processing technician. The others in her group were millennials, and she says they all chose training to become CNAs. The workforce council says low wages for CNAs contributes to an annual turnover of 30 percent to 50 percent.

Claxton chose sterile processing. The job entails rigorously cleaning and preparing instruments for surgery, which requires a knowledge of a wide range of surgical tools. “An open-heart surgery set has 250 pieces,” she said.

Tuition and fees for a 10week certificate course in sterile processing at Sacred Heart University are advertised at $1,675. Claxton took a six-week accelerated course, the tuition paid by the Health Career Academy and underwritten by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Martorelli said sterile processing is a growing health specialty, one available to people with a high school education. She said the median hourly wage in 2018 was

$17.41. The online job-search company, Indeed.com, lists available sterile processing jobs in Connecticut with annual wages ranging from

$33,000 to more than $63,000. As calculated by the United Way, a “household survival budget” for a single person in the Bridgeport area requires an hourly wage of $18.14. At

40 hours a week, that’s an annual income of $37,731.

Claxton completed the sterile processing course in March 2019, but all places for the certification test in March were full. The next test wasn’t until September, so Claxton took a job as a live-in home health aide. Claxton wondered if the delay would make passing the test harder.

“The test is not easy,” Martorelli said. “But Sandra passed the first time.”

She was hired at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport in September 2019 then was laid off in the spring after elective surgeries slowed during the pandemic. She was called back in August.

The health academy and other programs run by The WorkPlace serve about

30,000 clients annually. Some are beginning their careers, like 20-year-old Kady Tracey of Bridgeport, who also completed a sterile processing course and hopes to begin as a per diem employee at St. Vincent’s while she works on certification. She was laid off from one hospital job but is now working at a community health clinic in Stamford in a COVID-testing program.

Others are the first workers overlooked when there is a surplus of labor, the ones Joe Carbone of The WorkPlace says need a second look. They may be suspected as long-term unemployed, or having criminal records or histories of substance abuse. Before the pandemic, there was evidence of employers being more willing to consider them.

The Governor’s Workforce Council concedes in its strategic plan that the task never was easy.

“It’s an enormous task that will require a sustained commitment, with all hands on deck – business leaders, educators, social service providers, government policy-makers and community groups. The mission is no less than to rewrite the social contract with a fresh push to expand opportunity for all.”

Claxton sees it more simply.

“We all fall down,” she said. “And we all can get back up.”