Job Retraining For Some Cooke Co. Residents - KTEN.com - No One Gets You Closer

GAINESVILLE, TX -- Dozens of people out of work will get some career training thanks to a federal grant.

It's an effort to get people who've faced long term unemployment back to work. The grant money will be used to provide job training for 125 people in computer networks and servers.

"It will help them gain training in that in order to find jobs as a Cisco certified network administrator, with help desk technology, and server technology," says North Central Texas College adult education advisor Robin Jett.

The Department of Labor will give the college and unemployment offices in Cooke, Denton, Montague and Dallas counties a $5 million "H1B" grant over four years to get people back into the workforce by taking classes at their Denton County locations.

"For students who want to come into college and receive the grant, they have to be long term unemployed, which is over 27 weeks and they have to have at minimum an associate's degree," says Jett.

In the past year, the Workforce Solutions Texoma office in Sherman has seen the jobless rate drop from a high of 8.8 percent to under 7 percent.

"What we've seen in the past couple of months is a pretty good drop in the number of people that are unemployed, probably a couple thousand people," says Bob Rhoden.

Rhoden says the labor pool in Grayson, Cooke and Fannin counties jumped from 94,000 to 96,000, and more people have been checking into hotels than in the past few years.

Rhoden says they have also been trying to help over 1,000 people considered long-term unemployed to do everything they can to start getting a paycheck.

"We can do one-on-one job search assistance with them to help them find jobs that are available in our area that they might be qualified for, make sure they get an application and a resume in, and be able to interview for those jobs," says Rhoden.

The classes at North Central Texas college will start next month. According to the college, the grant will also help train current employees at a Denton County defense company called Labinal and may also help train employees at Business Control Systems, IBM, Lockheed Martin, and AT&T.