LANSING – A total of 72 percent of jobless workers who went through the state’s No Worker Left Behind program were able to either find jobs or hold onto their jobs, a report issued by the Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth said.
Andy Levin, who oversees the program for the department, said the program is helping workers develop a sense of lifetime learning, as 86 percent of those who found a job found one related to the training they had received in the program.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm hailed the report as evidence the program is producing results. “With this data, it is no surprise that No Worker Left Behind has become a model for national workforce policy,” she said in a statement.
The state recently marked that 100,000 workers have entered the program for training.
And in a radio interview, Levin said the program reflects the reality that individuals cannot simply collect unemployment benefits and wait on jobs as they once did while unemployed.
The study looked at more than 62,200 people who enrolled for training from August 2007 to February 2009.
Of those, 34,355 persons completed training under the program, and of those, 24,699, or 72 percent, had either found jobs or were still working. Another 9,656 were still looking for work.
The report said those workers finding jobs were able to do so when the state’s unemployment rate was nearly double the national unemployment rate.
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