Older job-seekers fall behind as SF Peninsula tech market heats up
Source: San Francisco Examiner
Traditionally, Menlo Park’s JobTrain vocational school served the various populations left behind during the boom years — meaning community college dropouts, people with rap sheets or folks who just didn’t have the connections to talk their way into the tech sector.
But the school’s student body has changed, JobTrain Vocational Counselor and Assessment Coordinator John MacGowan said. Now he’s seeing an influx of older professionals who may even possess graduate degrees or impressive resumes, but who somehow backslid.
... MacGowan has a term for this swath of the population: Recession people. They’re the smart, high-performing, mostly older workers who somehow slipped through the cracks. Although San Mateo County’s unemployment rate fell to a tolerable 5.1 percent in April, MacGowan says this group of students shows no sign of disappearing. In fact, these days, the stakes for them are much higher.
... In recent years, program instructors have set their sights a little lower by training people to be mid-level help-desk workers or service technicians at Best Buy. That’s still a challenge, MacGowan said.
Read more: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/peninsula/2013/05/older-job-seekers-fall-behind-peninsula-tech-market-heats
