After Job Training, Many Still Scrambling for Employment

“Just as soon as I could say, ‘Yes, I can program,’ I got a job,” Mr. Gustafson said. “I feel real secure.”

Mr. Gustafson had more than a decade of experience on the same machines he then trained to master. How easily can that success be replicated for lesser-skilled people?

The literature is not encouraging.

A 2006 study prepared for the Labor Department found virtually no benefit for 8,000 randomly selected recipients who entered federally financed training programs in 2001 and 2002.

In the year before their training, these people earned about $20,000 a year on average, according to the study. During the 15 months after their training, roughly 80 percent of these people were employed at some point, but their earnings in that period averaged about $16,000.

The 2008 study found that women were far more likely to benefit from training than men — cold comfort given that this recession has hit male-dominated industries like construction particularly hard.

Among those unemployed for six months or longer at the end of May, nearly 60 percent were men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 39 percent were in their mid-40s or older — another challenge to training programs whose results have generally been better among younger people. Nearly three of four had no degree beyond high school.

Bernard Pelzer, 56, has been jobless since the summer of 2009, when he was laid off from his position as a maintenance worker at a Manhattan office building. Since then, he has subsisted on a $260-a-week unemployment check.

Chasing Elusive Work

An African-American man who never completed high school, Mr. Pelzer has suffered a steady erosion of working opportunities. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he earned as much as $12 an hour as a handyman and security guard, enough to rent spacious apartments.

“You could pay your rent and take care of your family,” he said.

But in recent years, he has earned less than he did a quarter-century ago, even as the cost of living has climbed.

Now, with no paycheck, the bills are beyond him — even in a cramped apartment in East New York. He and his wife recently canceled cable television, their lone source of entertainment.

Last fall, Mr. Pelzer enrolled in a federally financed training course to become a certified building technician, following the guidance of a caseworker at a city-run work force center.

“I thought, ‘This is great,’ ” he recalled. “There are certain things you intend to achieve, but you run into blockages. Now, the blockages were going to be removed.”

But as Mr. Pelzer slogged through the muggy streets of Brooklyn last week in a brown dress shirt, carrying his résumé in a laminated sleeve, his training was beginning to feel irrelevant. Despite applying for more than a dozen jobs over the last month, he had yet to gain an interview.

“It’s very bad,” he said. “I haven’t gotten any response.”

Among those who have this year completed training arranged by New York City’s Workforce1 centers, half have found employment, according to the city.

But not Mr. Valle. As his 50th birthday approaches, he is living with his parents, unable to pay rent on an unemployment check.

Warm and effusive, Mr. Valle grew up in East Harlem, the son of Puerto Rican parents whose trajectory testifies to the potential of job training: His father sold hot dogs before parlaying classes in air conditioning and electrical repair into a career as a maintenance worker. By the 1980s, he was earning $45,000 a year.

Mr. Valle’s modern-day training has produced only frustration.

After he completed classes, the first interview his caseworker arranged was at a Family Dollar store in Brooklyn. It paid $11 an hour. Still, he figured he was in no position to be choosy, so he went, assuming he was the only one being dispatched to the interview. When he got there, nearly 50 people were waiting in a stifling warehouse. Some had been there for more than two hours. Some wore pinstripe suits, relics of short-circuited jobs at banks and insurance offices.

He waited an hour, standing because the crowd vastly exceeded the available chairs; because the applicants vastly exceeded the lone job being offered — an equation not altered by his upgraded proficiency in Microsoft Word.

“It was crazy,” he said. “I got so fed up that I walked out.”