City Program Trains Youth for Water Industry Jobs

An article in The Baltimore Sun highlights the Baltimore City Water Industry Career Mentoring Program which provides career training to city youth and helps clean polluted waterways in the process.

The idea is to solve two of Baltimore’s biggest problems — joblessness and polluted waterways.

Officials said the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development developed the program to address the retirement of seasoned workers in the water industry and a shortage of trained workers to replace them.

Jobs to be filled range from working on pipes to fixing erroneous water bills. Youths receive six months of mentoring and a chance to earn a career in the industry.

Mayor Catherine Pugh said the program lets Baltimore “take the lead in training the next generation of workers in the water profession.”

The mentoring program includes job-readiness training, introduction to different jobs in the water industry, job shadowing, work with a career coach, and a placement in the city’s summer jobs program, called YouthWorks. Participants then interview for full-time jobs that typically start at around $30,000 a year. The new employees are put on a path that often leads to salary increases, a department spokesman said.

“It’s a way for people who aren’t college-savvy to get a trade that you can do with your hands and still help out and contribute,” Dorsey said. “If this opportunity hadn’t presented itself, I would have been doing a lot of job-hopping.”

For more information read the full article in The Baltimore Sun. 

County workforce development and support services will be discussed at the 2017 MACo Summer Conference session “Second Chance for Workplace Success – A Good Program is Good for Your County” on Thursday, August 17, from 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm. Learn more about this session in the registration brochure.

The MACo summer conference is August 16-19, 2017 at the Roland Powell Convention Center in Ocean City Maryland. This year’s theme is “You’re Hired!”.

Learn more about MACo’s Summer Conference: