$200,000 in Federal Training Funds Available for White Collar Career Transitions

April 20, 2010

By Henry DeVries

To combat persistent unemployment and speed the local recovery, the San Diego Workforce Partnership awarded funds to UC San Diego Extension to provide no-cost training to Workforce Investment Act eligible white collar individuals.  The training offered will prepare displaced professionals and paraprofessionals who need job transition and lifetime career management skills.

The San Diego Workforce Partnership is providing more than $200,000 in federal funding this year to train out-of-work white collar individuals for emerging jobs.  In response, UC San Diego Extension has created a new pilot program to train 45 individuals to obtain skills for the higher demand jobs. The first group of 15 students will begin a 15-week training course May 17.

The target audience for the UC San Diego Extension program are workers with college degrees and five or more years of experience in professional or paraprofessional fields. For more information on federally funded training San Diegans should contact their nearest One Stop Career Center.  For Career Center locations visit www.SanDiegoatwork.com .

“Long-term unemployment has been a well-recognized phenomenon of this recession and white-collar workers are increasingly among the most hard hit,” said Mark Cafferty, San Diego Workforce Partnership president and CEO. “Architects, accountants, business analysts, journalists, designers, IT and finance workers are among the professionals now applying for unemployment and registering with recruitment agencies.”

Nearly half of the 5.4 million Americans who have been out of work longer than six months held white-collar or professional jobs that are rarely subject to long spells of unemployment, according to a study by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which based its analysis on Labor Department data. More than one-third of the nation's more than 15 million jobless were out of work for 27 or more weeks.

“To keep good jobs in America, we need to create new jobs and empower individuals to pursue these opportunities,” said Vicki Krantz, chair of the academic directors council at UC San Diego Extension. “In San Diego, we’re already very good at the kind of collaborations that produce good-paying jobs in high tech, biotech and clean tech and now we can help to close the skills gap by providing career management education as well.”

The pilot program will help white collar workers accelerate job transition by understanding how to research emerging job fields, harness technology like social media in job searches and understand the unadvertised job market.  Students will receive training through a variety of methods including classroom instruction and one-on-one coaching. In addition to providing training, UC San Diego Extension will gather data about white collar workers and provide job trend analysis to help refine future educational offerings.

The San Diego Workforce Partnership is committed to fostering economic growth and prosperity through education, training and lifelong learning.  The Workforce Partnership funds job training programs to meet the region's demand for qualified workers.  The programs benefit local employers, unemployed and recently laid-off adults, and at risk youth ages 14 to 21. Visit www.SanDiegoAtWork.com or call (619) 228-2900 for more information.

UC San Diego Extension, the continuing education and public programs arm of the university, serves approximately 54,000 enrollees a year, which translates to over 22,500 students in more than 4,600 courses.  For the convenience of working adults, continuing education courses are held online or evenings and weekends on the UC San Diego main campus and two other locations: the Extension Sorrento Mesa Center and the Extension Mission Valley Center. Visit www.extension.ucsd.edu or call (858) 534-3400 for more information.

Media Contact:

Henry DeVries at hdevries@ucsd.edu or 858-534-9955