On the Job-Hunting Road : Jobless Miss Out on Helpful Programs

After losing his job as a technician at the Xidex Corp. computer disk plant in Irvine, Quoc Le took out two loans for $6,000 to pay for private training in computer-aided drafting.

No one at the private school where he enrolled or at the state Employment Development Department told Le about a government-financed program to help casualties of plant closings acquire new job skills.

Jobs Plus, a program offered by a consortium of local governments in Orange County, could have provided the same training at no cost if Le had only known about it.

“It’s a crying shame,” said Jerald C. Dunn, planning manager for the Orange County consortium. “We are trying to get to these Xidex people, but we really don’t have an effective mechanism to do it.”

In today’s rapidly changing and increasingly technical business environment, retraining can be critical for people who lose their jobs as a result of plant closings, corporate mergers or cost-cutting efforts.

A broad range of government-funded programs are available to provide the unemployed with training, counseling and job-hunting skills.

But for various reasons, many people who lose their jobs do not participate in the assistance programs.

Many job seekers simply never hear about the programs. Some learn of them but do not realize the programs are free, or do not want to deal with a government bureaucracy.

The initial clearinghouse for information about government-funded occupational training and counseling programs is the state Employment Development Department, where jobless workers apply for unemployment insurance benefits and check job postings.

But unemployed workers are not told about assistance programs when they first show up at EDD field offices, agency officials acknowledge.

Instead, they are handed a stack of documents, including a brochure inviting them to consider occupational training and asking them to call a field office for details.

Most never call. In Orange County last year, about 103,000 claims for unemployment insurance were filed, but only 1,142 persons sought job training interviews at EDD. Of those interviewed, only 282 ultimately entered training programs.

Doris Martinez, supervisor of planning in EDD’s Job Service Divison in Sacramento, said the agency does not routinely discuss free occupational training with applicants for unemployment insurance because assessing eligibility would require extensive and costly interviewing.

She said EDD’s first priority is to help people find jobs. It is difficult to determine the need for retraining, she said, until an unemployed worker has a shot at the job market. And often it takes some hard knocks in job hunting, she said, for someone who had been working many years to resign himself to the fact that he should return to school.

Only after a worker has been unemployed 6 to 8 weeks, Martinez said, is he scheduled for an interview with an EDD counselor who then may broach the subject of training.

Martinez also said primary responsibility for victims of layoffs or plant closings falls on a separate statewide network of local government organizations that receive federal funds through the 1983 Job Training Partnership Act.

There are two JTPA organizations in Orange County. One is run by the city of Santa Ana and uses the services of the Assessment and Employment Center at Rancho Santiago College. That program serves only Santa Ana residents.

The other, Jobs Plus, is operated by a consortium of governments that includes Orange County and the cities of La Habra, Anaheim and Garden Grove.

The consortium’s Jobs Plus program is “one of the best-kept secrets in Orange County,” Dunn said.