An innovative job training program designed to teach basic employment skills to welfare recipients who've had difficulty finding work is succeeding, officials say.

Begun in the fall and sponsored by the Howard County Department of Social Services, the six-week training program has found jobs for 73 percent of its first graduating class, or 11 of 15 participants.

For those who have found work, the average hourly wage has started at $8, well above the national minimum wage, and some of the graduates have found jobs with such companies as Sears, Roebuck & Co., Rouse Co., NCR Corp. and First Union Bank in Howard County.

Laurel resident Dedee Simmons, a 29-year-old former gas station clerk who works as a temporary tax clerk for Rouse Co. in Columbia, says the program helped her recall skills she had learned in high school.

"I'd totally forgotten my business speech," Simmons says. "I spoke in a lot of slang. Now I've got vice presidents of the company around, and I have to know how to speak the right way."

Simmons said the classes helped her "brush up on a lot of the basic stuff that I hadn't done in 10 years."

Two training sessions have been held this year, with another scheduled to begin Feb. 1. Social services officials will sponsor four sessions this fiscal year at a cost of about $80,000. Next year, the sessions will cost about $17,000 each, said Hilanne Myers, coordinator of Jobs First, Howard County's welfare-to-work program.

Training has been limited to customer service and clerical support, but a fourth session scheduled in April will be in para-transit support, which provides door-to-door van transportation to the public throughout the county.

With the advent of welfare reform in Maryland in October 1996, social service officials put employment before education or extra employment training to move welfare recipients off the dole.

Howard's recent job-training sessions are some of the first in the state to reverse that trend, said Myers.

"For the last two years, we've usually put jobs before training," Myers said. "But the feeling is that -- for some people -- we do need to build up some of the skills in order to find employment. We limited the training to six concise weeks targeting areas where there's a need for support. And there's a big need for customer-service support in Howard County."

Myers said participants who were having trouble finding work were encouraged to take part in the training sessions to learn basic job skills.

"We're finding in our caseloads that those individuals who could find work already have," Myers said. "Those who are left at this point are those who are hard to place and who have, for a number of reasons, had a very difficult time finding or keeping jobs."

"Many of us have some past problems that we're trying to put behind us," said Ellicott City resident Yvette Kebe, 26, who graduated with the first class in September but has not been able to take a job because of her infant son's poor health. "We're trying to get back into the work force, but it's difficult."

Social services officials believe that many of their clients could find a job in the customer-service industry if they had specific training in basic computer skills, software training and other work readiness activities.

"The idea was that each person would increase their own skill level so that at the end of the program, they could assess what kinds of jobs they'd be ready for," Myers said. "With additional training, our clients were able to enter jobs at a higher wage," which decreases their chances of going back on welfare.

"It's been really hard, don't get me wrong," Simmons said of the program. "But the good thing is that the teachers don't teach you like you're a 2-year-old, and they teach you things that we really needed to know."

Though the Department of Social Services oversees the program and chooses the participants, training is administered by Howard Community College and Manpower Inc., an employment agency in Columbia.

The classes -- held at the Employee Success Training center at HCC -- focuses on basic word processing, keyboarding, introduction to computer programs such as Windows and Excel, and writing resumes. Students also get an intensive review in basic reading, writing and math.

Each student signs a contract with the college that binds him or her to classroom activities during the six-week session. Classes meet from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Some of the "soft skills" training involves discussions about having a work ethic, using credit wisely, managing stress and serving challenging customers.

"For a lot of the students, this is very new," said Vince DeSanti, who developed the curriculum at Employment Success Training. Some of them have told me that they've never heard about it or thought about it before the class."

Students go through mock interviews, which are videotaped and played for the rest of the class. DeSanti said the exercise gets them ready for the real thing.

"A lot of them are rather shy about their own skills, and this allows them to take two or three minutes to talk about themselves, which may be something they've never done before," DeSanti said.

Yet some who complete the program can't find work or keep a job.

"You're dealing with human nature and with people who have to be self-motivated and who want to be self-sufficient," DeSanti said. "And for one reason or other, there are people who go through the program and don't find a job. I don't think training is the ultimate answer. It's only good for anyone who's really interested in finding work."

Said Becky Lessey, coordinator of basic skills and programs for the foreign-born at the Employee Success Training program: "One thing that's come from the program is that almost everyone has been offered jobs. And that's not necessarily easy to do. Some have been out of the job market for a while, and their skills are rusty. Or they may not feel comfortable with the skills they do have.

"There's a lack of self-confidence that you have from not being in the work force for so long," Lessey said.

Another graduate, 28-year-old Columbia resident Francis Taymes, works in the processing center at First Union Bank in Columbia. She says the trainees are like a family.

"We shared each others' happiness," Taymes said, "and being together gave us more of a thrill of achieving. I was surprised by how well everyone got along. We helped each other."

Pub Date: 12/23/98