Tricks of the Trades

Vocational-education organizations spring up to pass along skills to a new generation of workers

Donald C. Ladick says he founded the Aviation Professional Education Center as a way to deal with a paucity of trained technicians while playing into his longtime love of airplanes. The nonprofit vocational school, in Chicago, last year graduated its first class of 28 people who specialize in maintaining and repairing aircraft, all of whom found jobs in the industry.

“I got into this to provide young people

with an opportunity for a great career and to afford a good living,” says Mr. Ladick, a retired General Motors Corporation executive who now runs his own consulting company. “We focus on getting people ready to work for the majors.”

In construction, health care, and other fields, a scarcity of skilled workers has helped propel the growth in nonprofit vocational schools, from 114 in 1999 to 426 in 2003.

Making It Official

Included in the numbers are established apprenticeship programs, run by local affiliates of labor unions — such as the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America — that have recently become charities to take advantage of tax breaks and to attract corporate donors.

Shortly after securing its charity status in 2002, the Topeka Electrical Joint Apprenticeship and Training Trust Fund, in Kansas, received a donation of equipment worth about $35,000 from the Square D Company, an electrical-equipment manufacturer. And the Sheet Metal Workers Local No. 20 Apprenticeship and Training Trust, in Indianapolis, registered its educational program as a charity with the IRS so it could apply for a $2-million low-rate state municipal bond to renovate several of the group’s five schools.

What’s more, some training programs, which started as job-creation efforts at other charities, have now become separate organizations.

Kenneth Gray, professor of work-force education and development at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Education, in University Park, says vocational schools should be a more popular choice than they are for people looking for steady, well-paying jobs.

“Most young people aspire to a four-year degree, and almost half take jobs they could have gotten right out of high school,” he says. “This country does not have a shortage of degrees; it has a shortage of skills.”

Vocational education, also called career and technical education, prepares people to take jobs that usually pay well above the minimum wage. Programs can last a couple of months or several years, depending on how they are structured, and usually include additional on-the-job training.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some of the fastest-growing jobs, such as physical-therapist assistants, can be obtained with skills learned at vocational schools, which often charge significantly less than four-year colleges.

Many trades now offer apprenticeship programs.

Concerns about the graying of experienced workers helped trigger the Boilermakers Local Lodge No. 647 Journeyman and Apprentice Training Trust Fund, in Ramsey, Minn., to establish a job-training charity, which received its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 2003.

“Our real drive to start the school was that we knew in a 10-year span we were going to lose membership,” says Paul Pendergrast, business manager of the lodge. “There is no mandatory retirement age, but because of the physical requirements of the work, very few work beyond 50 to 60 years old.”

The union’s members contribute a percentage of their paychecks toward the cost of the four-year, part-time education program. Local companies also make donations, so the 100 apprentices don’t pay tuition. The program’s budget last year was $400,000.

The wealth of career options now available has made it hard for some trades to attract skilled workers.

“Electrical used to be a family business,” says Beth Y. Margulies, director of public relations for the National Electrical Contractors Association, in Bethesda, Md. “Now you are having the second or third generation saying, ‘I’m not going into the family business,’ and you are having to reach out to new people.”

The electrical association has added six new apprenticeship-training programs around the country in the last three years and is participating in a job-placement program, Helmets to Hardhats, which resettles former soldiers in well-paying careers.

$70,000 Potential

The pay associated with many trade jobs is helping to attract students to training programs. Graduates of the Bluewater Maritime School, in Atlantic Beach, Fla., can find work that pays $30,000 a year or more, and once they learn additional skills on the job, graduates have the potential to earn $70,000 or more, says Robert J. Russo, a retired Coast Guard officer. He opened the school three years ago after recognizing a shortage of local experienced seamen and the opportunity such jobs could create for low-income people and students who have been expelled from high school or dropped out.

Some 250 students, who spent nine months completing training in vessel maintenance and other skills needed to work on a boat, have graduated from the school. About 20 percent of the students paid the full tuition, $18,000, which helps cover the fees for the low-income men, women, and troubled youths in the program. Mr. Russo also supplements the program’s cost by offering additional classes at the school, such as training to get a captain’s license.

“For a young person who screws up, they are typically expelled from the school system and that is a life sentence for being poor,” says Mr. Russo, who doesn’t draw a salary. “If I get all these guys productively working, when I go on Social Security they will be able to support me.”

Adopting Dual Missions

Helping poor people find better-paying jobs is also part of the mission at Brooklyn Woods, a charity that teaches furniture-making skills to unemployed or low-paid people living in New York City. The school operated for several years as part of the North Brooklyn Development Corporation, but it became an independent charity in 2001, after officials at its parent organization decided to focus primarily on developing housing for low-income elderly people.

“There were all these jobs in the community and no people to fill them,” says Patricia Manzione, who runs the school with Scott Peltzer.

The group, which trains a dozen people every seven weeks in the basics of woodworking, writing résumés, and job-interview skills, receives most of its $400,000 budget from foundations, including the Robin Hood and Tiger Foundations, in New York.

In rural, financially depressed Laveta, Colo., job creation was also behind the start of Lone Pine Educational, which teaches home-building and repair skills to local community-college students. The students earn $10 an hour while helping an instructor do home repairs.

Jack Robert Estes started the on-the-job classes as an offshoot of his business, Lone Pine Chimney Maintenance, to help students find work during school and after they graduate.

“We give them the option of staying here as well as learning a trade,” he says. “Then they can get out and become independent. It’s better than flipping burgers.”

Gifts totaling $10,000 from several people who regularly vacation in Laveta helped the program get off the ground. However, Mr. Estes has not been successful in soliciting many other gifts, and unless a nearby community college, Trinidad State Junior College, agrees to take over the program, it will probably be abandoned.

Keeping It Local

In LaBelle, Fla., students interested in vocational education must drive 70 miles to take most classes. As a result, a few years ago a group of citizens started plans for the Education Center of Southwest Florida, a vocational school they hope to open in fall 2006.

All classes will be geared toward skills need to find jobs in a five-county region in southwest Florida, such as welding, carpentry, masonry, and millworking, as well as other areas, says Norman Hughes, the school’s chairman. “We want to allow people to improve their skills so they can keep up and improve their wages,” he says.

Mr. Hughes anticipates that 100 high-school and 100 adult students will eventually matriculate. The land for the school has been donated by the Paul family, which made its money in the citrus industry, and the school’s board is in the process of securing a $5.3-million loan to build the facility.

While the increasing number of training schools is good news for many industries, observers worry about the image problem that career and technical schools have to overcome to attract good students.

Often people look at a car-repair technician as “the grease monkey who has no real skills and no real talent,” says Mary E. Hutchinson, executive director of the National Automotive Technicians Education Foundation, in Leesburg, Va. “But in order to repair cars, you need to have language, computer, and communications skills,” she adds.

“Career and technical education takes a bad rap,”she says. “We don’t necessarily think about how important those skills are to us in our world today.”