Julius Diaz was 55 years old when he lost his job at John Chatillon & Sons in Kew Gardens, Queens. Diaz had worked at the scale company for 25 years, most recently as a quality-control inspector, when it went out of business in 2005. He started searching for a new job and realized they all had something in common: “They wanted some kind of computer skills, and I didn’t have any.”
To collect unemployment benefits, Diaz was required to check in at one of the city’s Workforce1 Career Centers.
There, at the center in Jamaica, Queens, Diaz met with a career counselor who told him he might be eligible for certain benefits.
“She looked up my records and came back and said, ‘Wow, you’re entitled to some pretty good benefits.’ I had no idea what she was talking about.”
Those benefits included approximately $10,000 to be applied to education over a two-year period. Another counselor advised Diaz to look into computer training, which led Diaz to a program in Forest Hills, and then to a job in the IT department at CUNY Law School.
Diaz became one of an increasing number of city residents who are being put to work by New York’s fastest-growing job broker: City Hall. In the past four years, the city’s gone from three career centers placing 127 people in jobs each quarter to six centers placing 4,300 people – a nearly 3,300 percent spike.
The shift dates back to July 2003, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg merged the Department of Employment into the Department of Small Business Services (SBS), in part to beef up the city’s moribund job-placement efforts.
“It was appalling, the number of people who were coming through and weren’t being placed in jobs,” says Robert Walsh, the commissioner of SBS, which runs the Workforce1 centers along with the state Department of Labor. (There are two in Queens and one in each of the other boroughs, with a seventh due to open early next year in Hunts Point, The Bronx.)
“It was a dead end.”
One of the problems, says Walsh, was the lack of outreach to businesses in need of workers. Part of the Bloomberg initiative is to partner with employers, offering to help with their staffing needs, not only by finding qualified people, but by offering customized training, like a bank-teller training program.
“Counselors attempted to prepare New Yorkers for jobs without knowing the types of positions employers needed to fill and the skills they required,” he says. The centers now work to “identify businesses that are growing high-quality jobs, and prepare New Yorkers to fill those jobs.”
Employers the city now works with include Fresh Direct, the Queens-based JetBlue, Duane Reade and Whole Foods, whose new Houston Street store hired 349 city residents through the centers, in positions ranging from cashier to cake decorator. Some 800 jobs at the Atlantic Terminal Center in Brooklyn were filled through the Brooklyn center, where up to five employers come in to conduct interviews each week.
A head start
Part of the revamping process involved redoing the physical spaces of the old centers, previously called “One-Stops.” While giving a tour of the Downtown Brooklyn center, Walsh points with pride to the natural light, cheerful colors, airy layout and fully staffed computer center.
In addition to job referrals, each of the centers provides a range of free services, including use of computers, a resource library, GED and ESL classes, and workshops on topics from Microsoft Word to basic resume writing and interviewing skills.
Job seekers walking into a center first attend a 30-minute orientation, followed by a one-on-one meeting with a career counselor. This intake process helps the center set each client on the right track, says Katherine Kim, deputy manager of the Manhattan center, as well as pair them up with any appropriate social services – like help with childcare or housing.
“If someone has been unemployed for some time, chances are they’ll have additional issues to deal with,” she says.
Job seekers without such concerns move on to a career development track, involving a discussion of what kind of job they would like and whether they have the appropriate training or experience. Those who need training can then find out how to get it, which workshops to attend and how to set realistic expectations. Customers who walk into the center job-ready head straight to recruitment and placement and might even leave with an interview already lined up.
“It’s best if you can come in for a full day,” Kim says. The amount of information coming at you can be overwhelming, “but over the course of a day it’s easier to understand exactly what resources are available.”
As for the actual jobs available, while they run the gamut, most tend toward the entry level. Positions recently filled or currently available include customer service and sales reps, food service workers, bank tellers, airline ramp and ticketing agents and security guards and drivers.
The majority of people hired by Duane Reade start at entry level, but “there’s always room for advancement,” says Jim Scarfone, the chain’s vice president of human resources.
“Many of our store managers started as a stock clerk or cashier,” he says. “It’s a great opportunity to take someone young and train them, and hopefully they can have a good career with your company.”
Hire ground
When she opened the upscale bowling alley and lounge Harlem Lanes on 126th Street last year, Sharon Joseph found 38 out of the 45 employees she needed through Manhattan’s Workforce1, conducting interviews at the 125th Street center.
“We wanted to hire from within the community, and we just didn’t have the time or money to find the people we needed,” she says. “When we started hiring, we were still in construction, so we didn’t even have a location to hold interviews.”
Joseph, a Harlem native with an MBA from Columbia, knew about Workforce1 because she had been there as a job seeker herself.
“After 9/11, like so many people, I found myself unemployed, and I wound up checking in there” as required to collect unemployment. She says her expectations were low.
“I had these fears of the place being dirty and wondering what sort of job opportunities could they find for somebody with an MBA. So really I was just going through the motions. I was pretty surprised, because they had high-level job opportunities and I thought it was great that they had a computer facility so that if I needed to work on my resume or develop different skill sets, they had those opportunities.”
Karen Bobb of Staten Island ended up at Workforce1 when she became pregnant while working part-time in a support position at a consulting firm. Without benefits such as maternity leave, Bobb eventually had to stop working. She now has a year-old daughter and a full-time job as a broadband specialist at Time Warner Cable.
Her counselor at the Staten Island center “made a lot of phone calls for me, and he contacted my current manager, who ended up giving me the interview.”
Bobb, who has a bachelor’s degree in computer science, says she’s thankful to have a job with benefits, and room for advancement.
“After eight months I’m able to work anywhere within the company. I can get a promotion, so I could work at any of about 20 Time-Warner subsidiaries.”
As for Diaz, he’s still studying while working full-time – and will soon be eligible for additional free classes at CUNY. Despite being out of school for so long, Diaz says, “I’m doing pretty well. I had to get new reading glasses, but I’m glad I’m going to school. I’m going to continue doing it.”
There are Workforce1 Career Centers in these locations:
Manhattan
215 W. 125th St., between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass boulevards
(917) 493-7000
Queens
168-46 91st Ave., between 168th and 169th streets,
Jamaica
(718) 557- 6755
Also at LaGuardia Community College, 29-10 Thomson Ave., between 29th and 30th Streets, Long Island City, room C-400
(718) 609-2130
Bronx
358 E. 149th St., between Third and Courtlandt avenues
(718) 960-7099
Brooklyn
9 Bond St., between Livingston and Fulton streets
(718) 246-5219
Staten Island
60 Bay St., between Bend Street and Slosson Terrace
(718) 556-9155