Advanced manufacturing in general is a strong industry in New England; a recent analysis by Deloitte and the New England Council found
that in 2012, 59 percent of the region’s 641,000 manufacturing jobs were “advanced.”
With his certificate, Kecy is confident that he will find a job locally, and he’s probably right.
Now 32, Kecy is a few months away from finishing a six-month certificate program in advanced
composites manufacturing at Great Bay Community College in Rochester, N. H.
The program operates out of a satellite campus that opened in 2013, with aid from a Labor Department grant
meant to help community colleges reach “trade displaced” workers who need help training for new careers.
The Retraining Paradox -
Many Americans need jobs, or want better jobs, while employers have good jobs they can’t fill.
But he lost his job after the company restructured in 2012, he said, and soon he found
that his skills weren’t easily transferable to a new field; Datamatic’s technology was proprietary, and his expertise in the company’s installation program wasn’t appealing to employers outside that particular industry.
Hillary Clinton proposed retraining former coal-industry workers in new careers as part of a $30 billion package meant “to ensure
that coal miners and their families get the benefits they’ve earned and respect they deserve.” Even as Republicans have voted to cut funding for training in recent years, they have paid it lip service as a way to put Americans back to work.
It’s perhaps not surprising, though, that so much of the working class gravitated in the last election to Donald Trump, whose rhetoric about displaced workers was very different: blunt (if unrealistic) promises to stop old careers from disappearing,
to “bring back our jobs.” In its zeal for retraining, the federal government’s approach to the problem has become increasingly byzantine, a dizzying constellation of programs to help struggling workers prepare for new careers.
