All this week on Project Milwaukee: Help Wanted, we’re exploring the so-called skills gap and ways area business, governments, and workers are addressing it. Today on Lake Effect, we’re focusing on the workers themselves and will begin with a roundtable conversation with people at the HIRE Center, which is located inside Milwaukee Enterprise Center-South at 8th and National.
Funded by federal grants, the agency provides job training and education programs for displaced workers – those who have lost their jobs due to plant closings, layoffs, or other factors beyond the workers’ control. Training runs the gamut from teaching workers how to run complex machinery to remedial education classes for workers seeking GEDs. In the past decade, the Center has served an average of 2800 people a year, with an average placement rate of 80%.
WUWM’s Bob Bach visited the HIRE Center and spoke with Robin Klein, Jessica Delvalle and Connie Skonecki – all three of whom are enrolled in the center’s GED Program and hope to return to the workforce.
