They might as well have flushed the money down a toilet.
The government spent half a billion dollars on green jobs training – Only 10% of those trained found jobs.
Herald.net reported:
Government-funded training for so-called green jobs has come to a near standstill in Snohomish County, having produced lackluster results.
Over the past few years, about 500 residents in the county attended short-term training programs with the hope of landing one of 25,000 or more green jobs expected to be needed in the state by 2020.
So far, 95 of those 500 students have found jobs.
WorkForce Development Council of Snohomish County, which oversees training under the federal Workforce Investment Act of 1998, recently put a hold on sending more people through the training program, which had a job placement rate of about 20 percent.
That’s still a higher placement rate for green-job training programs than the national rate, which is about 10 percent, according to a recent U.S. Department of Labor audit.
Nationwide, about $500 million in Recovery Act funds were allocated to train nearly 125,000 people for green careers. Nearly a year and a half later, the audit found, only 52,762 people had been trained and 8,035 had found jobs.