By the Numbers

By Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 23, 1999; Page E01


To Tom Neff and others around a Fairfax dinner table three years ago, it
appeared to be a perfect fit.


Washington area tech companies were pleading for more skilled workers.
Federal agencies were desperate for programmers to rid computers of the
ominous year 2000 software bug. And welfare recipients needed jobs.


The outcome of that conversation was TekAid, a closely watched
technology training experiment directed by Neff's McLean consulting
firm, Mitretek Systems. It took 41 people from Fairfax County's welfare
and unemployment rolls on a 14-week forced march through mathematics and
computer courses toward an almost unimaginable goal. Those that passed
final tests were promised jobs as $40,000-a-year programmers in Northern
Virginia's booming economy, the sponsors said.


Today, though most of the graduates have jobs, many are working in
entry-level assignments and have never gotten near those $40,000
computer programming positions.


Former trainee Linda Kemp is an example of both the success and failure
of this ambitious experiment, whose results offer lessons about these
kinds of programs and promises. A central lesson is that entry-level
jobs are the realistic starting point for most unconventional trainees
such as the TekAid graduates, Neff and other sponsors have concluded.


For Kemp, TekAid's promise was dazzling -- and frightening.


"I'm 38, and I'd been out of school a long time," said Kemp, who had
been on public assistance since leaving her job as a corrections officer
for health reasons two years ago. "But I wanted it so bad."


Kemp took the course, passed the tests and now works in front of a
computer, handling accounting records at Computer Sciences Corp. in
Herndon, one of the region's largest information technology firms.


While she is a temporary employee assigned to CSC, her foot is in the
door, she says.


Halfway through the course, the local technology companies that had been
offering those jobs backed out, Neff says. He won't disclose their
names. When graduation arrived last Halloween, only a half-dozen
trainees were headed to jobs, and at that point, Kemp wasn't one of
them.


According to Neff and other program sponsors, Northern Virginia
employers were unwilling to take a chance on the graduates, despite
their worries about the region's estimated 20,000 unfilled technology
jobs.


It's a situation that is occurring across the country, said Andrea
Wooten, president of Green Thumb, an Arlington-based nonprofit that
coordinates training for 40,000 seniors and dislocated workers
nationwide.


"We bought into this whole IT [information technology] worker shortage
story," Wooten said in an interview. Green Thumb got similar promises of
jobs that didn't materialize, she said. "The [tech] job opportunities
are there, but most are not entry-level," she said.


Four months after the TekAid graduation in October, about 35 of the 42
graduates have jobs, many of them still working as temporary employees.
Their salaries average about $25,000, according to Edwin DeCastro of the
Fairfax Family Services Department, the project's coordinator.


It's not programmer's pay, but enough to lift the trainees' heads above
water, DeCastro said.


Before the training, most of the people could expect little more than a
minimum-wage job because of their lack of skills and job experience,
DeCastro said.


"All of these people were capable of flipping burgers," DeCastro said,
"but that doesn't change things. It keeps them on the [economic]
borderline." It takes just a sick child or a broken-down auto to knock
them off their feet financially, he said. "If something happens, they
are right back on welfare."


He believes that the program has opened up the possibility of permanent
jobs, more training, promotions and security for the graduates.


The upside is written on Kemp's face as she describes what a full-time
job has meant to her.


An undiagnosed thyroid illness left her unable to continuing working as
a corrections officer in southern Virginia, she said. Credit problems
mounted and by last summer, she was living in Fairfax County's Women's
Shelter with her teenage daughter.


Then she applied for the TekAid program, along with 140 others receiving
public assistance or unemployment benefits. They had to pass a
10th-grade mathematics test and persuade interviewers they would do
their best in the course. Only one-third had ever held a steady job.


"I was looking for motivation more than anything else," DeCastro said.


"The training was very compressed," said instructor Bob White, who led
programming classes at Virginia Tech's graduate center in Falls Church.
"Lectures three hours a day. Then lab for three hours more. If you
missed a day, it was like a week in a normal classroom."


DeCastro logged 70-hour weeks arranging for vans to pick up the trainees
in the morning and drop children off at county-financed day care
facilities. He found a mechanic to fix a trainee's broken-down car and
tutors to help with homework, and he made sure that food stamps and
assistance checks kept coming. Three of the trainees had babies during
the program.


"I saw a lot of tears. The stress they had on them was unbelievable,"
said White, a computer instructor at Northern Virginia Community
College.


The program had been designed to teach the trainees the Cobol software
language that is required to repair the most common of the Y2K software
problems in older mainframe computer systems.


At first, Cobol training for welfare recipients seemed an inspired
choice, Neff said, a way to link the region's shortage of tech workers
with its welfare-to-work policy requirements.


But it took two years to round up enough financial support. By the time
classes started last summer, many of the companies and agencies facing
Y2K fixes had already hired firms to do that work.


The frustration rose when trainees learned that the promised high-paying
programming jobs didn't exist. "The companies were no longer there,"
DeCastro said.


Some companies' human resources officials may have been enthusiastic at
first, but in the end, the same firms' program managers balked at the
risks of hiring the trainees, Neff said.


"We held two job fairs and invited 30 companies in to do interviews.
They took the resumes back, but in many cases, the resumes got lost in
the shuffle," DeCastro said.


Neff added: "We found lots of companies looking for programmers with 10
years' experience."


But the program also promised more than it could produce, according to
White. Its organizers misjudged the difficulty of teaching programming
to the TekAid class.


Most of the class members were smart and motivated, he said. "But not
everyone can program, regardless of intelligence. There were six to 10
of them who could have done well as programmers, and I was elated to
have that many." For the others, "the expectations were unrealistic," he
added.


"I don't think we had the training to get the kind of jobs we thought
we'd have," Kemp said.


As this reality set in, Neff and DeCastro shifted the course work,
enabling students to study a wider range of computer training that
matched their abilities, as they should have done in the first place,
they say.


"We now realize that every individual is so different, we'd like to give
them the chance to get into the [technology] field that is most suitable
for them," DeCastro said. That lesson is being used in designing new
TekAid programs for the District and suburbs, Neff said.


There was another basic problem -- a reluctance of some employers to
hire former welfare recipients, regardless of what classes they had
passed, according to Neff and White.


"Most of these are remarkably capable people. They've had some bad luck
or made one or two bad decisions. Maybe they got pregnant, and then the
father left and they were stuck." Once they wound up on welfare, Neff
said, they were labeled.


"Yes, I was on public assistance," Kemp said. "But I have worked all my
life. Some of the companies simply put too much emphasis on welfare and
kind of blackballed us."


With graduation approaching, Neff and DeCastro brought in Bob McIntire
of Sparks Personnel, an employment firm specializing in providing temp
workers throughout the Washington region.


"Point blank, they needed a job, whether it was technical or not," said
McIntire. "We were able to help with that."


The graduates' positions include a World Wide Web page designer, a data
entry specialist, a cable installer and various office jobs requiring
computer skills, DeCastro said.


Kemp considers herself one of the lucky ones. If all goes well, the job
with CSC will become a permanent position with possibilities she could
not have imagined a year ago.


She says simply, "That program saved me."