Kitsap Business and Economy

By Rachel Pritchett
rpritchett@kitsapsun.com
BREMERTON
The number of out-of-work people hitting the local employment office is more than 50 percent over what it was last year, forcing busy counselors to find new ways to help.
“It’s astonishing,” Margaret Hess, the new manager of WorkSource Kitsap, said about the droves of job-seekers now coming to the office that helps find jobs for workers and offers retraining.
In June, 2,749 people visited the Sylvan Way employment
office, a 53 percent rise over June 2008, when 1,798 came looking for work. The biggest group of jobseekers was between the ages of 18 and 44, with no more than a high-school diploma or equivalent.
Kitsap County’s unemployment rate was 8.1 percent in June, with 9,930 out of a job, according to the state Department of Employment Security.
Federal stimulus money has helped keep job centers like WorkSource Kitsap County going as other funding sources have dried up. It’s allowed for the Kitsap office to add three new people to its staff of roughly a dozen.
Two are helping would-be workers and one is recruiting employers who might have job openings, Hess said.
Meanwhile, WorkSource staff members are urging their clients to assess their work skills to see if they need updating. It’s best to update skills now, while the economy is down, they are saying. WorkSource often has funds to help pay for new training.
Hess said people from the banking industry who come to WorkSource are finding they now need to update their computer-technology skills.
Many others are retraining into just about all of the health-care fields. Still others are using the time to get welders’ certificates. Business-management certificates are hot now, too.
One man who didn’t have a college degree was able to take three quarters of schooling at Olympic College for a business-management certificate, and now oversees a sales office on Bainbridge Island.
“This is where some of our people are getting into,” Hess said. “We are seeing more of our people getting into these career paths because there is a demand.
Tougher to solve are the large numbers of construction workers coming in. Some 700 construction jobs were lost in Kitsap County in the last year.
“For them, they’re not wanting to retrain because it’s a matter of waiting for the market,” Hess said.
State Employment Security Commissioner Karen Lee echoed the importance of taking time now to update skills.
“In this tough economy, it’s more important than ever to help workers gain the skills to compete in their local job market,” she said.
Staffers at the local employment office also are attempting to help with mental and emotional turmoil workers go through when they lose a job, maybe for the first time in their lives.
WorkSource Kitsap County now has workshops to find ways to ride through the rough times and make the most of the interval of unemployment.
As for finding more jobs for the legions now coming in, staffers are looking to Kitsap’s small businesses — those with 50 workers or fewer. They might need help getting the right person for the job, and who might not be aware of tax incentives if they do hire.
Available jobs in Kitsap County are available at www.go2worksource.com.
More help, including retraining opportunities, is available at WorkSource Kitsap County, at 1300 Sylvan Way. The office’s phone number is (360) 337-4810 and the e-mail address is wskitsap@esd.wa.gov.
WorkSource is a partnership between Employment Security and other agencies to provide persons looking for work with training and other services, including job referrals.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 10:19 am by Rachel Pritchett and is filed under Uncatagorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.