President Signs Job Training Bill as VP Releases Job-Driven Training Report

Employee Relations

This week, President Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act into law, reauthorizing federal job training programs and marking a rare bipartisan accomplishment for Congress and the Administration.  Alan May, Vice President, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, The Boeing Company and Jaime Fall, Vice President, Workforce and Talent Sustainability, HR Policy Foundation attended the ceremony representing businesses’ role in passing the legislation.  The Administration also used the opportunity to release the Vice President's report on his review of job training programs requested by the President in his State of the Union speech in January.  The report, "Ready to Work: Job-Driven Training and American Opportunity," highlights federally funded job training projects that the Administration believes successfully prepare workers with the skills they need for jobs in demand and includes a 15-point "job-driven checklist" program providers are supposed to use to help make them more effective.  At the signing ceremony, the President said the passage of the legislation and the release of the report were the beginning of changes to improve federal job training programs to better serve jobseekers and employers alike, noting:

Today, I'm directing my Cabinet—even as we're signing the bill—to implement some of Joe's recommendations.  First, we're going to use the funds and programs we already have in a smarter way.  Federal agencies will award grants that move away from what our Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, who has been working very hard on this, what he calls a "train and pray" approach, and I'll bet a lot of you who have dealt with folks who are unemployed know what that means.  They enroll, they get trained for something, they're not even sure whether the job is out there, and if the job isn't out there, all they're doing is saddling themselves with debt, oftentimes putting themselves in a worse position.  What we want to do is make sure you train your workers first based on what employers are telling you they're hiring for.  Help business design the training programs so that we're creating a pipeline into jobs that are actually out there.