01.05.2006 -
By Remy Adams
DURHAM, N.C. -- For a decade, the Center for Employment Training has
worked to help low-income individuals learn the skills needed for the
workplace.
Part of a national network of centers based in San Jose, Calif., the
Durham office was launched as a demonstration project and continues to
provide training for roughly 100 low-income people a year in a work-like
setting.
Overall, the Durham office has helped roughly 1,000 low-income people find
and keep jobs, says Tim Moore, regional assistant.
Students typically are age 22 to 44, and are unemployed, single with
dependents, and read at or below an eighth-grade level.
Completing the program takes seven months, on average, and 80 percent of
those who finish find a job with starting pay averaging $9.55 an hour.
The goal, center officials say, is to help people not only get jobs, but
keep them.
Seventy percent of graduates still have jobs one year after they are hired.
In preparing students for jobs, the center tries "to replicate and emulate
the work place," Moore says.
Students arrive at 8 a.m. and work until 4 p.m., and their training
program includes punching time cards, taking two breaks and working with
instructors who double as supervisors.
Instructors actually have done the work for which they are preparing
students, and they teach not only the "hard" skills needed for fields such
as business office or medical assistance fields, but also the "soft"
skills of regular attendance, good attitude and work ethic.
Moore says graduates who later become supervisors still call CET when they
need help.
CET, says Tyrone Everett, regional director, focuses on "training and
retraining of low-income people, people from challenging backgrounds and
communities who have multiple barriers to getting employment."
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