I knew a lady who enrolled in a job retraining program back during the Clinton years. It was very underwhelming, to hear her tell it. Very basic job training programs geared to entry-level positions. Certainly nothing satisfactory to someone coming from a skilled trades position or most white collar office jobs.
In all fairness, I don’t know if that’s the norm for these kinds of programs, or if the woman I knew had an atypical experience. Just sayin’ the one I do know about seemed to be basically worthless.
Vast fortunes are made “training” the hopelessly unemployable. This, as always is a government scam. “Community groups” get billions to train people who are not even competent to drool on themselves. But ACORN and Co. will win big.
My information from that period, from someone in dire need of any sort of training, was that in our area, the retraining programs consisted mainly of how to run an automated cash register. Not much training needed for that, of course.
Community colleges are up to their necks in political pull and state micromanagement, from what I have heard. They pick areas that were *hot* several years ago, ignoring saturation in various labor categories and creating sinecures for *teachers* in need of a job. One case I know something about involved a person who failed in running their own business in a hot field and who was then, through connections, made head of a retraining curriculum in that same field. They routinely get 17 students (close to the minimum needed to retain the program), graduated 12 and have 8 working at all and 5 working in the chosen field a year later.
What training is going to pay off in this economy? I know the community colleges track graduates and their success/failure at finding work in the field for which they trained. I wonder if there is a list of these results somewhere?