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| navigate: home: magazine: fall 2003: article | |
| Workforce education program focuses on life skills By Melissa W. Kaye | ||||||
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When Brenda Williams found herself looking for a job after taking time off to raise her three children, she knew it would be difficult. “When I decided to go back to work, it wasn’t quite as easy as it was when I first got out of college,” she said. “You have to be on top of things for employers to take you seriously.” Williams, who has a master’s degree in administration, eventually landed a job as marketing director of a theatre company in Philadelphia. However, it was her experience looking for work that helps her identify with clients in her current position as the workforce development agent for Penn State Cooperative Extension in Chester County. In this role, she collaborates with businesses, agencies and community groups to assist low-income individuals in getting and keeping employment—in a program known as the Community Bridge Project. “I was fortunate,” she said. “I could afford to stay home. Our participants can’t.” While the program helps those out of work or who work part time to stay refreshed and interact with others, its main purpose is to help individuals build the practical life skills of communication and problem solving they perhaps never learned. “These skills are competencies that some people take for granted,” Williams said. In general, participants are mostly women, who, through some type of life circumstance, ended up on public assistance and have been mandated to either train to look for a job or look for a job for 30 hours a week. As the urban coordinator of the program, Williams reaches such women from Chester and Delaware counties. The program’s curriculum is fittingly titled Skills for Taking Control of Your Future: Life Skills, created by Dr. Natalie Ferry, coordinator of special program initiatives for Cooperative Extension. She said the program focuses on an individual’s self-perception to help individuals find a good-fitting job. For example, people can have overall low self-esteem, but can perceive aspects of themselves as highly competent. Helping individuals identify their personal competencies is key to figuring out the jobs in which those qualities may be reinforced. A people-oriented person would function better as a receptionist than a data processor, explained Ferry, which may lead to longer job satisfaction and employment retention. “Some people can have little money, but be fulfilled in their jobs,” she said. “And some people may be stuck in their jobs with no personal reward.” The program also focuses on job readiness—how to prepare a résumé, application completion and interviewing. To reach as many people as possible, Williams has built a network of partners who have similar components. “We share tools,” she said. For example, she often works with James Logan, coordinator of the Chester County Chamber of Commerce’s Jobs and Advancement through Mentoring program, which provides mentors to young women in transition from welfare to work. “We try to find nonjudgmental people who are willing to supply support and resources to act as mentors,” Logan said. “When young women look at that along with all that the Life Skills training has to offer, they get inspired and say ‘What do I have to lose?’” Other organizations Williams works with include Chester’s Baby SPOC, a parenting and educational program for mothers in their teens and early 20s; Wings for Success, which offers disadvantaged women work-related clothing; CareerLink, the state’s job-search and training tool; the West Chester Community Center; and the Delaware County Housing Authority. The Delaware County Housing Authority provides Williams with a success story she likes to share. She describes a young woman with a 6-year-old child who went through the Life Skills class and then was able to get a job as a cook. “Last year, she moved into her own home,” Williams said. In another case, a young woman interviewed for and got a job with Cooperative Extension as an administrative assistant after going through the Life Skills program and computer training at CareerLink. The woman, Judy Mills, had a daily two-hour commute to the program for a year. “I wanted to work and get off assistance,” she said. “I wanted to try my best.” Cooperative Extension agents teach additional aspects of the curriculum: Dr. Robert Thee teaches basic financial management, and Denise Talko and Fran Alloway offer nutrition and food safety tips. The Community Bridge Project also reaches women in some of the state’s rural areas, including Northumberland, Columbia and Lycoming counties. In addition to providing leadership and running her own sessions in these areas, rural site coordinator Annette Kratzer sponsors daylong classes to train government agency case managers on how to use the Life Skills materials. Kratzer said she often receives feedback from participants who say the communications aspect of the curriculum is most helpful. One woman was even congratulated on her newfound skills by her employer. “They work hard on that, and it can translate into family life,” Kratzer said. Williams added, “It’s a great program. When it works, it’s exciting, and I say, ‘Yes!’ Not everyone is a success. But when people put their heart and soul into it and use what they’ve learned, it’s great.” | |||||
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