Photo by Nathaniel Welch

For 3 1/2 hours four days each week, Al Wisniewski, 53, slips on his safety goggles and a hard hat and learns how to operate pumps and transfer liquids safely inside a mock chemical processing plant. Then, after a quick break, the laid-off auto worker settles into a college classroom for another 3 1/2 hours of lectures, as he learns the intricacies of fluid dynamics and how pump and propeller mechanisms work.

For this self-described “big-time car nut,” who built custom racecars before he lost his job, the course load and homework sometimes seem staggering as he tries to master a new field. On weekends, he said, he’s been forced to trade hot-rod magazines for chemical processing textbooks. But at the end of the 16-week Fast Start training program at Delta College, a community college near Saginaw, Mich., Wisniewski is confident “there’ll be a golden pot at the end of this rainbow”—a well-paying job as a chemical processing technician.

“This is one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had, starting up school again,” Wisniewski said. “I’d still be building racecars if I could, but now I can apply my past experience to something new. If it wasn’t for this training program, I’d probably still be drawing unemployment and thinking the worst right now.”

Moving automotive workers into burgeoning green economy

Here in Michigan, a state ravaged by devastating layoffs in the automotive industry, and where unemployment stood at 14.1 percent in May, a collaboration between the state’s workforce development agencies, its largest employers and local community colleges has pioneered an innovative system that moves workers from automotive jobs into a burgeoning green economy. The Fast Start program is proving that through cooperation and detailed planning, the region can create a stream of “just-in-time workers” who are in great demand in the growing solar industry after four months of intensive, college-level training.

Saginaw’s move to develop employable workers is just part of an ambitious statewide program, called No Worker Left Behind, designed to retool workers and give them the training they require for jobs in biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, health care and other industries.

Andy Levin, who heads the state’s No Worker Left Behind program, notes that Michigan is “ahead of the game” when it comes to retraining because it never fully recovered from the recession of 2001. “One of the things we’ve realized,” he said, is that “you cannot replace an auto worker’s standard of living without getting new training.”

Nursing programs are full

One of the busiest retraining programs in the Detroit area teaches laid-off auto workers, their spouses and others how to become registered nurses. “Our nursing programs are full, full, full,” Levin said. “The biggest bottleneck is that we don’t have enough nursing faculty or clinical placements” to train all those interested.

Since No Worker was launched in August 2007, more than 68,000 workers have entered its training programs, and more than 6,700 people are currently on a waiting list. The program pays tuition costs of up to $5,000 a year for two years at Michigan colleges or approved training programs, and some 9,000 training programs have been certified as eligible since the initiative began. But even this program has not escaped the state’s budget cuts. In May $7.8 million was cut from the $15 million Michigan had planned to contribute to the total $130.6 million No Worker Left Behind budget.

Much of the training is focused on technology and green jobs. Through such programs, Wisniewski believes, the seeds for Michigan’s revival are already being sown. “What we knew of as Michigan as a manufacturing state—that’s probably gone forever,” he said, tugging at his Detroit Tigers baseball cap. “Instead, I think we are going to become a technology state, not a manufacturing state. I gotta tell you, I’m pretty geeked up about all this right now.”

Model for the nation

Michigan may prove to be a model for the rest of the nation. Since the recession of 2001 never really ended here, experts say, this state is ahead of most others in reinventing programs to move workers from shrinking industries into new careers.

Michigan’s No Worker program demonstrates “a sense of creativity born of desperation,” said Kate Gordon, a vice president for the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. “Michigan has taken a lead in trying to figure out how to retool a highly skilled workforce” for careers in emerging sectors like renewable energy and wind turbine design.

Ed Oberski, CEO of Great Lakes Bay Michigan Works!, called the Saginaw program “a true collaborative exercise.” The region’s chemical companies, led by Dow Chemical and Dow Corning, along with Hemlock Semiconductor Corp., are investing millions in new capacity and developing new kinds of specialty products to meet the demand for solar power. The companies partnered with Delta College to develop curricula. No Worker Left Behind helps pay tuition for the trainees—most of them, like Wisniewski, refugees from the auto industry—while they train to become chemical process technicians.

Promise of middle-class wages

“We’re telling workers with demonstrated skills that if you successfully complete the program, you’ll qualify to get a job that will pay middle-class wages,” Oberski said.

Steve York liked the sound of that proposal. York, 50, spent 27 years as a machine repairman at Delphi Saginaw Steering Systems, then worked at a series of other automotive jobs before being let go in April 2008. The automotive industry once employed some 60,000 workers in the three-county Saginaw region, but now offers paychecks to only about 8,000, Oberski said, and York, a single parent, was resolved to change careers. He was recruited at a job fair last fall to join the first Fast Start class at Delta.

In May, he began working full time at Hemlock Semiconductor, which processes chemicals to produce high-purity polycrystalline silicon, the key building block not only of semiconductor chips used in mobile phones and computers but also of photovoltaic solar panels.

Going to school “was just like having a job, but with no pay,” York said. “It was a little tough—you know. Man, I’m 50 years old and going back to school! But it was fun, I enjoyed it.” After completing his training, he received two job offers.

Fast Start for experienced craftspeople

The Fast Start program, which crams two semesters of normal college work into an intensive four-month program, is designed specifically for experienced craftspeople like York and Wisniewski—workers whose resumés reveal significant experience in mechanical fields, and who can demonstrate literacy, critical thinking skills and mathematical skills in pre-enrollment testing, said Pat Graves, director of business partnerships for Delta College.

“We have a very skilled workforce here in mid-Michigan,” she said. “They just need the training to do another job.”

Much of the credit for the multi-sector collaboration, participants agreed, goes to Dow Chemical, which realized about five years ago that if it hoped to arrest a decline in its commodity chemical business, it had to develop a new kind of worker to fabricate new kinds of products.

“We decided that if we didn’t want to die, we needed to earn the right to grow,” said Jennifer Hayes, a learning project leader for Dow. To move into more complex specialty and high-performance products, Dow needed more flexible workers with advanced training. And while the area was full of skilled workers, Dow couldn’t find all the people it needed, even after it started its own internal training program.

Fast Start graduates fit the bill. Because most of them are experienced workers, said Hayes, they are disciplined and willing to learn the computer skills needed to run a chemical processing line.

Learning to write and edit programs

That’s what Dennis Lewis, 53, is doing. In Mount Clemens, a Detroit suburb, Lewis, a veteran machinist who never used a computer—“not even to do video games with my son”—is now learning to write and edit programs used in high-tech precision tools. He is part of a Fast Track program at Macomb Community College that teaches computer numerical control (CNC) skills to job seekers, another training initiative in partnership with No Worker Left Behind.

“I’ve seen a lot of job opportunities for guys with this sort of skill,” Lewis explained, as he sat at his computer terminal writing code, “but I just didn’t have the qualifications. So I figured I’d better go and get trained up.

“It’s tough,” Lewis said of the six-week program, “but I’ll get through it.”

His fellow student, Jeff Kummerl, 46, is already proficient on a computer, but came back to school after e-mailing his resumé to some 200 potential employers without getting a single response. “I’ve worked in a machine shop for 18 years, and I figure if I can master these CNC skills, there’ll be a lot of opportunities.

“It’s the right move to make,” Kummerl said. “Sometimes you have to open your own doors.”

Michael Zielenziger writes on the economy and business.