Does It Work? Retraining the Unemployed
Kenya Tolliver did what President Barack Obama told her, and millions of other unemployed Americans, to do.
After losing her graphic design job, she went back to school to get retrained as a Web designer.
Nine months later, she's still looking for work.
"It's very hard out there to find a job. There's nothing there," said Tolliver, 34, of Austell. "I keep applying and, hopefully, something will come through. Maybe people will start hiring."
With unemployment still high -- metro Atlanta's rate shot up last week to 10.3 percent -- questions abound as to whether worker retraining really works.
While Washington has pumped $10 billion in grants into retraining programs nationwide the last two years, critics say much more is needed to deal with the unprecedented surge in the long-term unemployed. Georgia's public technical colleges, along with for-profit ones that have proliferated during the recession, report huge increases in enrollment, yet many struggle to prepare students for so-called "jobs of the future."
Federal retraining dollars helped 19,050 Georgians go back to school in 2009. About 69 percent of those students got jobs within three months of graduation, according to the state Department of Labor.
Some schools don't adequately retrain workers for new jobs. Some graduates discover that once-promised jobs in nursing or medical billing, for example, now require three or four years of work experience. Or prospective employers demand even more training. Or the futuristic jobs don't exist.
Most schools boast sky-high job-placement rates. But they only tally graduates, not students who dropped out. And many students end up finding jobs in fields they consider inferior to the ones they trained for, or toil for much less money.
