New Skills, Few Job Offers: When Work Is Scarce, Retraining Offers No Quick Fix, Unemployed Find

From the Wall Street Journal | Mar 17, 2010 | By JUSTIN
LAHART

MAYS LANDING, N.J.-Training and education are said to be the best
route to a better job, but Cynthia Motte is still waiting to see if
that's true.

Ms. Motte and millions of other jobless workers across the country
are discovering that new skills can take you only so far when jobs are
scarce.

Scott Lewis for The Wall Street Journal

Cynthia Motte, between job interviews in
New Jersey on Tuesday, is looking for work after finishing an
office-technology course in December.

In
February last year the 47-year-old was laid off from her job selling
time-shares at the Seaview Marriott in Galloway, N.J. In July, she
enrolled in an office-technology program at nearby Atlantic Cape
Community College hoping it would quickly land her a new position. She
finished that program-and a four-week internship in December-but is
still hunting for work.

Ms. Motte still thinks the training will help her get hired. "The
fact that I have the computer skills will put me on par with someone
who's younger," she says. She reckons that, along with 25 years of
experience as a salesperson and manager, will make her an attractive
prospect for any job that comes up.

Economists agree that retraining pays off, eventually.

"The labor market just isn't doing a lot of hiring right now, but
there are obviously long-run payoffs" to retraining, says Harvard
economist Lawrence Katz. He says that's especially true for skills that
can be applied to a variety of jobs.

But while retraining may improve unemployed workers' long-term
prospects, in the shorter term many are struggling to find work. Job
losses across the country have hurt blue- and white-collar workers alike
and left few industries unscathed. That has created a deep pool of
workers competing for the positions available.

Labor Department figures show there was one job
opening for every 5.4 unemployed workers seeking work in January. That
compares with about one opening for every two job seekers before the
recession. As of February, 6.1 million Americans had been out of work
for 27 weeks or more.

In southern New Jersey's Cape May and Atlantic counties, which
Atlantic Cape Community College serves, the problem is particularly
acute. Casinos offered stable employment for years, but with gambling
revenue down 20% over the past two years, that is no longer true. Resort
areas along the coast are languishing and the housing sector has gone
bust. Last year, the area's average unemployment rate was 11.9%,
compared with 9.3% nationally.

Atlantic Cape Community College seeks to identify what areas offer
the best employment prospects, but because the downturn hit so many
vital parts of the local economy, options are limited.

"The best we can do is stay in touch with the business community and
what's happening," says economist Richard Perniciaro, director of the
college's Center for Regional and Business Research.

The college has emphasized courses such as computer-network
administration, where more jobs are available.

Even so, placing students has become far more difficult than in the
past. Before September 2008, when the recession gathered steam, 90% of
the students who finished its career-training classes found work,
usually within six months of graduation. Since then, the placement rate
has fallen to 30% to 40%.

It's the same story across the country: In Milpitas, Calif., Virginia
Fermin, 58, is also looking for work and finding that new skills aren't
a silver bullet.

She spent 30 years at a semiconductor-chip factory until Hitachi Ltd.
shut it down in February 2009. A nonprofit Silicon Valley retraining
program steered her to BioHealth College, in San Jose, where she spent
seven months training as a medical assistant, finishing with an
internship in December.

"I changed my career because I think the medical field, it's going to
continue to be in demand no matter what," she says.

But she doesn't have a job yet. Indeed, even though health care has
been one of the few industries where payrolls have been growing, that
fact has made it a magnet for hordes of job seekers. In February, there
were 1.2 million workers seeking employment in the broad education and
health-services sector, according to the Labor Department, up from
521,000 in December 2007. In January, there were 0.6 openings per job
seeker in the field, compared with 1.4 openings per job seeker in
December 2007.

For many workers, training opens doors-but it doesn't necessarily
shorten the job search at a time of high unemployment.

Nancy Eade, 55, of Charlotte, N.C., was laid off as a marketing
program manager at IBM Corp. in December 2008. She then took courses at
management-consulting firm Right Management, and then studied to get
project-management certification at the nonprofit Project Management
Institute.

Early this year, Ms. Eade started taking classes in business analysis
and quality control at Central Piedmont Community College. Finally,
last month she landed a job as a project manager at Bank of America
Corp. "I did everything right and it still took me 14 months," she says.

Back in New Jersey, applications keep piling up on the desks of
prospective employers. Before the downturn, AtlantiCare, which runs two
hospital campuses in southeastern New Jersey, would get about 2,500 job
applications a month. Now it gets 4,000 to 5,000.

"That's one of the challenges people who go through retraining
have-they're in a numbers game," says Richard Lovering, who leads human
resources and organizational development at AtlantiCare.

But, he adds, the previous work experience of recent Atlantic Cape
students doing internships at AtlantiCare has made them strong
candidates. "Ultimately, it is going to turn; employment is going to
come back and these folks are going to be much better situated," he
says.

Write to Justin
Lahart at justin.lahart@wsj.com