Allan Appel Photo
Boulay with employer Richard Sgueglia, whose Advanced Office Systems, of Branford, hired three people through the program; two have stayed.
When the data center Robert Boulay managed moved to Atlanta, he stayed in Connecticut. Then large-scale data centers disappeared. Result: Boulay was out of work for five years.
No longer.
His long-term unemployment to skilled, well-paying employment success story was on display Monday afternoon as 30 people, employers and employees, from seven participating companies gathered at the Workforce Alliance headquarters on Ella Grasso Boulevard to pat themselves on the back and spread the good word.
Gagne of the Workforce Alliance and Kristin Petritz, of Protein Sciences, in Meriden, surround Grewal, whose VEOCI is a participating company.
They were there along with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro to hail a $5.5 million federal competitive grant that the Workforce Alliance and the Eastern Workforce Investment Board (EWIB) recently won to put skilled long term unemployed workers like Boulay in the info-tech and advanced-manufacturing business back on the job in Connecticut companies. The grant came from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Ready to Work Partnership.
When Richard Sgueglia of Advanced Office Systems of Branford hired Boulay, the program paid his company up to 75 percent of the salary for up to 20 weeks, until the new employee was up to speed.
Computer and web technology changes so fast that it puts out-of-work techies at a disadvantage. It sometimes takes up to a year for a new employee to be brought up to speed, Sgueglia said.
The federal support added up to about $8,000 to $9,000 per company, per employee, per year, at an average salary of $22 per hour, for the 361 people like Boulay whom the program has already placed in good jobs.
The Workforce Alliance job-placement team has been ahead of that first grant’s schedule. So it has been awarded this new $5.5 million. It will translate into placement of 567 new skilled employees in the science, technology, engineering (STEM) fields, said Christina Bartucca, the project manager.
“The intent is to bring [the hires made possible by this program] to full time and full salary,” said Sukh Grewal, co-founder and CEO of New Haven-based VEOCI, a web-based emergency management software company that hired two new employees of its total of 16 last year through the program.
Workforce Alliance Executive Director Bill Villano and DeLauro.
Click here for a story of how the city used the VEOCI software during Superstorm Sandy.
Grewal, who designed nuclear reactors and web systems for General Electric before starting his company three years ago, could not praise the program enough. “We love it,” he said.
Grewal especially liked the idea of the funding of the program. All the $170 million national pool, from which Connecticut’s award derives, comes from the fees that companies pay when they apply for an H‑1B specialty work visa for an employee. The vast majority of the new hires —all must be out of work for six months or more — are new workers, except for about 15 percent for “up-training” of incumbent workers.
10 percent of the program’s beneficiaries also must be veterans, a feature Sen. Blumenthal highlighted in his remarks.
“Even if someone doesn’t stay with you, they are better trained. When you are up on state of the art web work, you can get a job anywhere,” Grewal added.
Of the two employees he took in the first round of the grant, one now works full-time with his company of 16 employees. The other went back to graduate school.
“There’s a huge competition for the top of the line talent, that’s the H‑1B people. They’re critical,” he said, citing how they will go on to create yet more jobs through their own inventiveness and forming new companies.
Bartucca said the first round of the grant, $4.9 million that was awarded in 2012, helped Workforce Alliance place 361 people thus far, and is way ahead of schedule. That success helped garner attention so that, with the help of the state delegation, the efforts led to the new $5.5 million, which is not yet in the pipeline.
Of the first round placements, only about 20 have been in New Haven, said Paul Gagne, one of the job developers.
“We’d like to make the New Haven number higher,” but all that depends on getting the word out to more New Haven companies and job seekers, said Bartucca.
The contact to do precisely that is Workforce Alliance job developer Paul Gagne; he can be reached at 203 – 867-4030, extension 219.
Sgueglia said when he first heard about the program his initial reaction was that “it’s too good to be true.”
It’s both. Ask Robert Boulay.