'Green' jobs lining up on horizon

From the Boston Globe by James O'Brien, Globe Correspondent  |  May 31, 2009

Since she was laid off, Norma Shulman of Framingham has decided she
has one more chance in her working life to change careers. She plans to
make that switch count for something.

Shulman, 63, a technical writer, lost her job at Bose Corp. in
Framingham when the company laid off about 1,000 workers in January.

Now her plan is to find a green job, something with "additional
social meaning and relevance," Shulman said. But she knows she'll need
some retraining to land one. "I've been interested in this since junior
high school," she said. "I was interested, even then, in solar panels.
But I need to learn a little about the technology."

In local communities and throughout the state, agencies and academic
institutions are gearing up to satisfy what is expected to be high
demand for green-job training.

"Right now I have three voice mails waiting for me, saying something
just like that, 'I'm out of work and I want to get into retraining for
a green job,' " said Marybeth Campbell, workforce program director at
the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center in Boston.

During a panel discussion on the topic of green workforce training
at the 495/MetroWest Business Expo in Framingham last week, Campbell
said help for people seeking green jobs is on the way.

The center, a quasi-public agency formed under the state's Green
Jobs Act of 2008, is coordinating state funding for training.

The state programs are so new, said Campbell, that information isn't
yet generally available through traditional sources such as the state
Department of Workforce Development's One Stop Career Centers.

But Campbell is spreading the word informally at events like the expo, in advance of a full public rollout.

Three key programs are set for implementation.

The Energy Efficiency Skills Initiative, offering nearly $2 million
in grants raised by auctions of carbon-dioxide emissions allowances
under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, will provide
green-building training to contractors and job-seekers with limited
incomes.

Massachusetts Bay Community College hopes to offer green-jobs
classes at its Ashland campus and perhaps its Wellesley campus as soon
as this fall, in part with the help of the Energy Efficiency Skills
Initiative.

"We're focusing on the more grass-roots, hands-on portion of
training," said Howard Ferris, dean of the college's new Division of
Transportation and Energy. "We want to be a lead vocationally oriented
program" for green jobs.

The future of green-jobs training at MassBay anticipates state
funding but is not reliant upon it, Ferris said. Classes on the
maintenance of hybrid cars and the technology that fuels them have
already been part of the Ashland campus since 2007.

"We're going to be focusing on this with or without the grant
money," he said. "It's just the direction of the division overall."

The Clean Energy Center is also developing the Workforce Capacity
Building Program, in which selected schools and community-based
nonprofit organizations would receive part of $950,000 in state grant
money to develop green-job curriculums. Implementation is expected
around the end of August. The third initative is the Clean Energy
Center's Pathways Out of Poverty program, which is set to receive $1
million from the state to provide green-job skills training for
individuals with incomes at less than 300 percent of the federal
poverty level - which for a family of four is an annual income of
$63,600.

Initially targeting six communities across the state, including
Worcester, the program would teach participants skills such as solar
panel and insulation installation. Rollout is set to begin this summer.

Meanwhile, Framingham State College is developing a major that will
fuse green technology and science classes with learning about the
regulations and rules that apply to an emerging green industry. The
school went before the state Department of Higher Education to get
approval for the program on Friday. The department's decision is
expected by early summer.

Carl Hakansson, a geography professor at the college, is involved in
the effort in his new capacity as the school's sustainable policy
coordinator. He said that training is important, but there's more to
teach in connection with what he calls a "reinvention of the economy."

"Environmental jobs have for the most part been reactive jobs,"
based on "come clean up this mess" situations, Hakansson said during
the 495/MetroWest Expo panel. "It's time to place more emphasis on
proactiveness. It is very important that people are well-versed in
science, but they also need to be well-versed in policy."

Shulman said she's planning her green-job retraining with an open mind toward all aspects of the industry.

"It might not only be the technical side of it," she said. "I have
the idea that any business, whether it's solar or wind or clean energy,
they need someone to take those instructions and processes and present
that information to a wide variety of audiences."

Given the size of the layoffs at Bose, Shulman is eligible for
training grants coordinated by the state career centers, funding
associated with mass worker displacements.

For now, until that application process is complete, she's busy with
filling out forms, and waiting for her turn to go learn a new green
job.