One-Stop Career Center Offers More Than Just Employment

Patricia Kitchen | Change@work

September 6, 2001

Been laid off? Feeling dumped? Well, you might be interested in a place where they try real hard to treat you with TLC -- even though they're seeing 6,000 others walk in their front door in a month.

It's the Queens One-Stop Career Center in Jamaica, mandated by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to help get you a new job, cut out as much red tape as possible -- and keep you satisfied when you visit what once was called the unemployment line.

Expect to be called a customer instead of an "applicant or "claimant, says Michael Josephson, location manager with the State of New York Department of Labor, one of the three agencies that operates the center and others like it on Long Island.

Also expect to be met at the door by a greeter, who will direct you to the right program -- from some of the 13 agencies represented. (A sign by the greeter's desk says he or she will find a translator if you speak such languages as Albanian or Creole or Korean or Urdu.)

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And finally, expect to pay nothing, as you already have through your tax dollars.

Except for the pricing, this center is being run "with lessons from the corporate world, said Ellen Howard-Cooper, assistant deputy commissioner of One-Stop Operations, with the City of New York's Human Resources Administration, another of the three partners. (The third is the New York City Department of Employment.) That's the way Congress wanted it, she said. Plus, "there's great accountability.

Indeed, to keep its level of federal funding, the center has to show it's placing about 70 percent of those who choose to work with a career adviser, and that 80 percent of those placed stick with their new jobs for at least six months. It also has to show that about two-thirds of those job seekers surveyed are satisfied with the service.

Placement data for the Queens One-Stop, which opened last July, is not yet available, says Howard-Cooper. Despite glitches that happen in any big government office, preliminary results of a customer satisfaction survey "suggests that 90 percent of the customers' surveys were satisfied; of these about 70 percent were very satisfied.

One pleased customer -- at least after her first day -- was Suzanne Georgiou, an Astoria mother of two sons, ages 5 and 8. With her husband out of work, she came in to look for full-time employment for herself and says she was glad to hear about a training program in non-traditional jobs for women -- such trades as plumbing, carpentry and blueprint reading. Carpentry rang a bell for her -- "I would love to do it, she said, partly because she watched her uncle and grandfather do carpentry work, partly because she would be placed in a union apprenticeship after the training.

In the same orientation session, she was glad to hear about free or low-cost health insurance for her sons, both of whom are asthmatic. Is having all these services under one roof convenient? "Definitely, she said. "Otherwise you have to run all over the city.

Among the other services available to workers and unemployed alike:

A career-advisory staff to help with resumes, interview skills and free training options;

A resources center with a free fax, copying machine, computers, a job database, and a satellite branch of the Queensborough Public Library;

Workshops and classes in the basics: resume writing, interviewing, computer and Internet skills, as well as General Equivalency Diploma requirements and English as a second language;

A staff to answer questions related to unemployment insurance -- though all filing is done by telephone these days;

Job fairs, some for special groups, including those about to leave public assistance and dads who are behind in child support.

Job matchmaking also gets done there, as employers look to the center as a source of new workers -- companies such as Old Navy, the new Toys "R Us coming to Times Square, and Bombardier Transportation, which is staffing up for AirTrain, the $1 billion-plus transport to Kennedy airport that's under construction.

What's in the works? An increase in evening hours, plus subsidy information for child care and transportation needs. Opening in October or November is a new One-Stop Center in Harlem. Look for more to be opening in the other boroughs, as well.