The U.S. Department of Labor is awarding $10,272,838 in
grants to help communities in Alabama, Arizona, California,
Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Georgia, New Mexico, New
York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin
develop new systems to train American workers for high-skill jobs
in areas where companies are facing labor shortages.
"These grants will help businesses and local leaders address
the challenge of keeping workers employed and competitive," said
Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman. "We don't have a worker
shortage in this country - we have a skills shortage."
The grants will be used to establish new regional
partnerships to respond to employers' identified skill shortages.
Members will include businesses, associations, labor unions,
community colleges and other post-secondary institutions and
community and faith-based organizations.
These efforts will include: developing a collaborative
approach for the design and implementation of a comprehensive
skill shortage action plan; collecting data to assess community
employment needs, the availability of workers who possess
particular skills in the local labor pool and the availability of
training resources; designing training strategies to respond to
at least one of the skill shortages identified; pilot-testing
these strategies with eligible dislocated workers, incumbent
workers and new entrants to the labor force to determine if these
strategies meet employers' expressed skill shortage needs; and
incorporating the lessons learned at the end of the demonstration
so that the partnerships and local workforce systems will
continue these efforts to respond to skill shortages.
A list of grant recipients follows:
