WORKFORCE 3ONE TRANSCRIPT OF WEBINAR On-the-Job Experience: Your Secret Weapon for Making Placements THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2009 Transcript by Federal News Service Washington, D.C. BRIAN KEATING: All right. With that I’m going to turn things over to Judith Gilbert, our moderator today from the national office. Judith, take it away. JUDITH GILBERT: Thank you so much, Brian. And welcome to all of you to the SCSEP webinar on on-the-job experience – OJE. We have two very experienced presenters with us today: Joyce Welsh from AgeWise Solutions, who is our long-time favorite SCSEP trainer and who is known to most of you, if not all of you; and also Becky Scott who is the regional director for Experience Works in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi, and also for the Texas and Arkansas state grants. And Becky has been working with Experience Works on SCSEP kinds of things for 24 years. So we’re delighted to have both Becky and Joyce doing the bulk of the presentation. What we’re going to cover today are basically four things. What is on-the-job experience? Going to define that for you. Going to talk about how to use, about how it works and what the approval process is that you need to go through in order to be able to implement OJE. Before we get into the bulk of the program, though, we’d like to do – ask you a couple of questions. And so we have a poll. And so the first question is this: Are you currently using OJE? Yes, not sure, or no? Brian? MR. KEATING: Okay. And in order – I see some people are already voting in the poll but if you’d like, please go ahead and click the radio button option next to the answer that best fits your situation. So your choices are yes, not sure and no; your response to: Are you currently using OJE? (Pause.) All right. And thanks for voting, everybody. It looks like several people have already voted. We’ll leave it up for a few more seconds in case you haven’t gotten a chance yet to vote. Go ahead right now and just click the option next to the button that is your answer. (Pause.) MS. GILBERT: And here’s our next question: Have you had successful outcomes with OJE? Yes, mixed outcomes, or no. And please vote on this second poll question now. MR. KEATING: All right. Very good. Same process, everyone. Go ahead and click that button. We’re going to play a little tune here to give you a few minutes to answer. (Pause.) MS. GILBERT: – very, very much for voting. And we’ll actually have an opportunity to ask you another question and you can do the poll – a poll again at the very end. So with this I would like to turn things over to Joyce Welsh. JOYCE WELSH: Okay. Thank you, Judith, and greetings to everyone. I will be walking you through the how and the why and the what. And Becky will be joining me in the conversation on and off all the way through this presentation, really bringing the nitty-gritty rubber meets the road, really ugly or great experience of it all and I think that’s really going to be a very important part of this webinar is really talking with someone who does it. It’s really easy to say it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, but hearing it from somebody who’s had the direct experience I think makes it all worthwhile. So for those of you who have not yet used that OJE option – and according to our poll that’s a good 65 to 68 percent of you – I would like you to know that it is indeed perhaps the most important tool in your bag of tricks to attract employers both to SCSEP and its participants. Under this OJE option you can contract directly with the private sector, in essence subsidizing the learning curve that every new employee brings to any new job. OJE gives participants a competitive advantage in what is turning out to be a very difficult labor market. It does this by offering the subsidy to the employer while the participant is learning those skills that are very specific to his or her individual workplace. For a moment just think how long it took you to get comfortable in your SCSEP job and feel you really had control of the situation and knew exactly what to do and how to do it and when to do it. This essentially is – it’s those specific skills to a workplace that a participant cannot learn at a host agency that you can subsidize using this OJE option. Also, just being able to offer a training subsidy at application time might just be that little extra push that might bubble up our participant’s application to the top of what is more and more being a very big stack of applications. So why is it important? Bluntly, because it leads to unsubsidized employment. When you look at the three major issues confronting every grantee now you will see how OJT (sic) can help you. First, see increased focus on unsubsidized employment in the ‘06 Older Americans Act. Secondly, three of our six performance measures revolve around placement. And then finally, the increasing difficulty of placing older workers due to the current economic downturn. That combination of factors makes the ability to work directly with a for-profit employer really an important tool to at least partially open up the door to SCSEP and to your participants. When the match is a good one and when the outcomes are successful, word of mouth from employer to employer really will be an immense benefit in addition to your job development efforts and activities. Social marketing research has proven for a very long time that your last customer is indeed your best customer. So successes with OJE will help brand your program as a recruitment source for skilled, assessed and trained workers. So very briefly, how does it work? You can place a participant in an employer’s worksite for up to 40 hours per week for a period of up to 12 weeks. So it can be part time or full time, short term or long term, depending on the skill level of the participant and the particular complexities of the job. You are going to be reimbursing the employer up to a negotiated percentage of paid wages for the cost of providing training and additional supervision related to that OJE. There are three payment modalities that are an option for you. Two are employer reimbursement models and one is a grantee direct payment model. Grantees using OJE each have their favorite, each claim their pros and cons to all three. And we want to walk through that with you and I’m going to bring Becky into that conversation so you can get a sense of how each of these three modalities work. The first employer reimbursement model is for a short-term OJE, no longer than four weeks. So for one to four weeks you may reimburse the employer up to 100 percent of wages spent on that participant. If you’re going to be negotiating a longer OJE, up to 12 weeks, you may reimburse that employer up to 50 percent of paid wages. Now, what you can’t do is negotiate a short-term – a four-week OJE – at 100 percent and then somewhere in the middle of week four the employer decides Suzie needs maybe another two weeks so he wants to negotiate another two weeks at 50 percent. That you cannot do. You must decide at the outset whether this’ll be a short term or a longer term OJE and negotiate accordingly. The third payment method is what we call direct wage payment and that is when you, the grantee or the sub-grantee – whoever it is that’s making the payments to the participant – will continue to pay the participant directly. Okay. All of these payments come from the participant wage/fringe benefit line item and you are paying at prevailing wage. It’s always best in the employer reimbursement models to negotiate the best deal you can. So just because you can reimburse up to 100 percent doesn’t mean that’s what you have to do. You just have the leverage to do it. Some grantees, for example, might start the first week at 100 percent; reduce it to 80 percent reimbursement week two, 50 percent week three, et cetera, as the participant becomes more skilled in the OJE. So you have all kinds of options. You’re not stuck to just reimbursing at one rate. Okay. Advantages and disadvantages of each. Those grantees that love the employer reimbursement model swear by it. They say that the employer has hired the participant, therefore already making an investment. And the OJE is much more likely to stick because of that investment that the employer has made, at the very least for the fringe benefit costs. So they say there’s greater potential for positive outcome and less potential for employer abuse of the program. The negatives of the employer model is the possible perception of the employer of just so much red tape and bureaucracy and the government getting into their payroll records and business, et cetera. The direct wage payment by the grantee, the grantees using this method swear by it saying that it’s much simpler for the employer and therefore possibly more attractive. Negatively, the employer has not made an investment through the contracted period and therefore could renege if the ongoing contact – you know, if the OJE doesn’t work out or if you do not have enough contact with that employer to monitor progress. So three models, pros and cons to each. And Becky, I’d really like to get your experience of you and your state and local project directors in which of these modalities you use and why. BECKY SCOTT: Thank you, Joyce. Hello, everyone. We actually at Experience Works allow our people to use all three modalities. We try to match the OJE to the needs of both the participant and the employers. That dictates which model we go with. My people feel like most of the employers themselves rather the shorter term, which – the shorter term OJE – which kind of sounds odd but I’ve been – you know, we pretty much sometimes hear, why would I need to train someone for 12 weeks? What’s wrong? Isn’t this person trainable before the end? We also do a lot of direct wage payments. We work with a lot of small mom-and-pop operations and there’s less expense for them upfront on the employer. Some of them are scared and they’re afraid of all the paperwork they have to do. They are worried about the workman’s comp costs and they don’t want to go out on a limb and put that out so we cover all those costs on the direct wage payment option. So we do a lot of those. And we do, do a lot of the 50 percent reimbursements but we usually do them for shorter periods of time when we can. Those – MS. WELSH: Becky, have you seen any difference in outcomes using one modality or the other? MS. SCOTT: I think the key is if you match it to the need of the participant. We have not – we’ve written – we’ve only had about – we’ve only had one OJE fail this year in my area out of 14. We wrote – about half of those were direct wage payments and the rest were – we had I think three or four that were 100 percent reimbursement. So it just depends if you did a good match to the employer’s needs and the participant. It’s not really that any different mode works better or not; it’s if you made the right match. Does that make sense? MS. WELSH: Is it fair to say that the small mom-and-pops prefer the direct wage and the larger employers the employer reimbursement? Is that a rule of thumb that we could make? MS. SCOTT: We always try to do the 50 percent reimbursement first because it’s less expensive on our part. And like you said, there’s that employer buy-in; they’ve made a financial commitment so they’re more engaged. The direct wage payment is probably the last option we use but we use it when we know that our person needs that chance to get into the job and this employer won’t go with us any other way because they don’t want to mess with the paperwork or the fringes. MS. WELSH: With the direct wage payment do your participants actually go through a formal interview process with that employer as they would with the employer reimbursement model? MS. SCOTT: They do. They go through it and in all the instances they have training plans and there’s a developed list of skills that need to be obtained and timelined behind each one of these modes. MS. WELSH: Okay. Thank you, Becky. That brings us right in – you’d think we planned it this way, wouldn’t you? – to the contractual specifications that you have to come to terms with before you place anyone at a host agency. You must negotiate a contract or an agreement, however you’re going to term it, with the employer before you place the participant at that job site, just as you would sign a host agency agreement prior to assigning a participant there. There are a few things that are musts in that contract. First, you have to identify the specific skills that are to be learned during that OJE period. You know, why are you subsidizing? What are you subsidizing, in other words, with your Title V money? Secondly, you must specify and outline the timelines involved. How many hours per week, the number of weeks, not to exceed 12. Third, you have to detail the benchmarks that the participant must achieve to be hired permanently. Now, this is a really important piece because this is the one that will ensure no negative surprises at the end of the OJE. This is also what you’re going to be regularly monitoring against to make certain progress is being made along the way and that the supervisor is satisfied. So these benchmarks are absolutely critical and you and the employer – the supervisor – must really sit down and put them on a piece of paper, negotiate them as necessary, but come to agreement. Okay. There’s three more things that need to be stipulated in the contract and the first is also very, very important. And that is that at the end of the training period if the OJE has been satisfactory the participant will remain on the employer’s payroll. You’re also going to include the amounts the employer with either be reimbursed or the participant paid. And then finally, you must stipulate who is responsible for the workers comp costs. The rule of thumb is whoever signs the check that’s given to the participant assumes those worker comp costs. So the two reimbursement models the employer will assume the cost and the direct payment model the grantee or sub-grantee will be assuming those costs. And speaking of workers comp, just like at a host agency you want to make sure that your participant is in a safe and healthy work environment, the same is true with OJE. So before that participant starts you’re going to want to do a quick safety check and evaluation of the actual work site. Simple is always best when it comes to contracting with the private sector. There’s less perceived red tape that way. You want to make it easy for the employer to partner with you and want to work with you again, not only on OJEs but hiring your other participants as openings emerge. Similarly, you want to make sure that your own internal grantee/sub-grantee review process and approval process is very timely. You know, when an employer has a job vacancy he wants it filled now, not three weeks from now or four weeks from now when the grantee and the sub-grantee get their act together. So Becky, a little reality check here. Can you share with us a little bit about what your contract looks like and how it is used as a tool for successful outcomes? MS. SCOTT: Sure. Our contract, first of all, is called an On-the-Job Experience Agreement. We kind of try to talk in the words “agreement” because some, again, of our smaller employers get kind of scared off by the word “contract.” So we refer to at as an “agreement;” it’s a little bit more friendly. It’s a one-page document that actually has all of the pertinent employer information. It actually specifies the position title, the actual date – start and ending dates of the agreement, the number of weeks that it’s going to last, the hourly rate, the number of hours per week, the total training hours, and the reimbursement rate if applicable, and the total cost. And then there’s a section of terms and conditions that kind of goes over all the things you were talking about. You know, we explain to the employer that they need to have a job description and a training plan, that they need to provide equipment, a safe working environment, they can’t discriminate, we talk about workman’s comp. So we review that with them and then there’s the signature. And then in addition to the agreement our people submit a job description and training plan, which is built upon the actual job description at the employer for that job. And the training plan section is where we actually list all the individual skills that’ll be learned and along with timelines so that when we’re monitoring the contract that’s the things we’re checking. We’re checking to make sure that the person is learning those skills and that they’re on the timeline. We also have a third form that’s a reimbursement form that gets submitted either at the end of the contract or every two weeks if it’s a longer term agreement. And in that document, besides requesting the reimbursement based on the agreed upon rate, the employer actually evaluates the performance of the participant. And we pay attention to that very carefully because if there’s anything that’s not looking good in that evaluation, it could possibly cause the OJE to fail and we want to address that right away. So our first page outlines all the contractual agreement, or the terms of the OJE. Our second page is all the training that’s going to be obtained along with timelines. And the third page is the reimbursement and evaluation. We actually – our field coordinators write the OJEs and develop the opportunities for them and they turn usually an IEP, an assessment and this OJE form into their regional manager to kind of check that the OJE is really needed, that we’re not already putting an already trained person into the OJE and that the training plan looks like it’s adequate to actually bring this person to employment and employment that’ll stick. And then they check that we have enough money, because we’re always having to track what we’ve committed, and they approve the OJE for the coordinators. MS. WELSH: And about how long is that process, Becky, that internal EW review and approval process? MS. SCOTT: Well, once the person – we have the participant in mind and the employer, it’s a that day thing. MS. WELSH: Good. MS. SCOTT: They fax all those things – because the employer needs this right away. If you don’t – if you’re not quick, you lose your opportunity for your participant. So we have a system in place where they fax these forms to their manager and they look at them right then and there. If the manager’s not available, I’m available. They find one of us and they get it approved right then and there. MS. WELSH: Okay. If you would talk for just briefly, if you would, about the monitoring process, especially for these short-term OJEs. How frequent is it? Is it telephonic, on-site, et cetera? MS. SCOTT: Well, in my mind, besides matching the right person to the right employer the monitoring is the second key to success. You know, there’s so many things that can go wrong and most of the time when an OJE fails it’s because it wasn’t properly monitored and we didn’t catch something that we could have corrected early on. One of the things we try to get our people to do is – it sounds simple, but number one, the first day on the job for the participant, make sure they showed up, because we have had instances where that didn’t happen. So we usually do that by telephone. We make a quick call to the employer, just want to make sure Jane Doe showed up today and is everything going okay? Good. Great. We look forward to this. And then maybe later in the day a little call to Jane as well to say, make sure you got there. Is everything going okay? I know you’re nervous but you can do it; kind of build them up. And then depending on the length of it we try to monitor them every other week. We do try to conduct at least one visit on-site so we can just make sure everything’s going as it’s supposed to be. But we do a lot of weekly telephone contact. Then right at the end of the – as the end of the contract is approaching we again contact the employer – usually that’s a phone call – and let them know the anticipated end date, remind them that they’re supposed to hire this – you know, the person’s supposed to stay on their payroll after the end of the agreement, and if it’s a direct placement – I mean, direct reimbursement rate where we’re paying the participant ourselves, we remind the employer that their going to be paying the timesheets because we’ve been paying them up to this point. And then usually at the end of the contract we like to personally take the reimbursement form to the employer and get them to fill it out right while we’re there because that way we get it. There’s no – believe it or not, sometimes if you don’t do that it’s a month or so before you get the paperwork you need to close out this OJE. And you don’t want that to drag on. So we get the reimbursement done right then and there and again remind the employer that they’re hiring that person and that they’re on their payroll and kind of thank them. And try to also use that opportunity to build the opportunity for another OJE or another job in the future. MS. WELSH: Okay. Thank you, Becky. And just FYI, we will be posting sample contracts and forms from a variety of grantees together with this archived webinar. So we’ll give you more information on that at the end of the webinar. Okay. Real quickly I want to walk us through the basic requirements. First, you – well, let me just say right upfront that current host agencies cannot be – cannot have OJEs. Never mind this slide. There we are. Very good. See, older workers at work; we eventually get there. Okay. So current host agencies cannot have OJEs. For those of you who have been doing OJE for multiple years, this is a change. Just make note of it. The purpose of OJE is to reach out to new employers who have no direct subsidized relationship with SCSEP. Programmatically, before placing anyone in an OJE they first must have at least had two weeks at a community service assignment at a host agency. It is important that the details of the OJE are written in that individuals IEP; that is, the job, the type of job is part of that individual’s job goal. The actual skills to be learned are skills that are not attainable at the host agency and are indeed detailed in the IEP, that these skills can only be attained at that specific employer’s site. Prevailing wage will be paid and you will take the money from the participant wage/fringe benefit line item, whether it’s an employer reimbursement model or a direct payment model. Many grantees are afraid to try OJE because they think they don’t have enough money to do it. They see prevailing wage and they just think it’s going to cost too much. But the truth is it doesn’t. I think Becky alluded to that a minute ago. A short-term OJE at prevailing wage, even at 40 hours a week, is still going to cost you less than keeping that participant on for another year or more at minimum wage. So don’t let the prevailing wage issue turn you against OJE. Okay. A few other issues to keep in mind. Do not close out your community service assignment form until the OJE is completed. You are essentially – the participant is essentially off the host agency site getting training, just as if they were at the community college. That’s how you need to think about this. The exit form will be completed at the end of the OJE. Okay. So the first day of unsubsidized employment is the first day that the participant is no longer being subsidized by Title V wages in any way, shape or form. Okay. If the OJE does not work out, you will return the participant to his or her host agency – or another host agency if there’s been too long a period of time – because, after all, you haven’t exited them yet. They’re still your participant; they’re just leaving one training setting and going into another one. Okay. The contract with the employer has to be kept on file and your last paperwork responsibility if you are – when you, not if – when you are doing your monitoring you will keep detailed case notes in the file. Okay. The last few provisions are only one OJE per participant per 12-month period. So this is not – you know, participants are not trying out a variety of jobs. They can only go to one OJE that is part of their job goal per year. Similarly, only OJEs per job category per 12-month period for an employer. So if Target comes to town you can sit down with the HR director and negotiate five OJEs for cashiers, five for shelf stockers, five for inventory – I’m making this up; whatever it is. But only five per job category per 12-month period. And then the last thing to keep in mind is the great flexibility on the program. You can use OJE all by itself, 40 hours a week for however long it is; or you can combine it with your other two training modalities: host agency training and classroom training. So if a participant, for example, is a little reticent to leave the comfort and home of their host agency, you can start the first week – maybe in the morning they go to their host agency, in the afternoon they go to the employer, and then gradually reduce that dependency on the host agency. Or, for example, if the employer has a need for a higher level of, let’s say, Excel spreadsheet use, a greater facility than your participant brings, you can send them to a classroom training setting, say, in the mornings and then go to the OJE in the afternoon. You can use any combination that works for you and your participant, just so long as you do not exceed the 40 hours of paid time per week. Okay. The last piece is the approval process. Before you do anything DOL has to approve your OJE plan and approach. So you’re either going to include that plan as part of your regular grant renewal process, or if you want to start it midyear – or hopefully right after this webinar – you can modify your grant. And if that’s what you choose to do I would urge you to be in touch with your FPO so you know how to go about beginning that modification process. So what do you have to do? What I’m going to do is refer you to Older Worker Bulletin 04-04 and there – in that bulletin there are 11 bullets that you – all you need to do is answer them. Fill in the blanks. And then attach a sample employer contract to those answers to that bullet. To get to Older Worker Bulletin 04-04, if you do not have it already, you go to the SCSEP Web site, www.doleta.gov/seniors. You will click on “technical assistance” on the right hand menu. And then you’ll click on “older worker bulletins;” I think we have the URL up there somewhere. And you can then print out that bulletin and you will get all the information you need to know what to do to modify your grant and get approval. Okay. Sub-grantees similarly do not have authority to use OJE unless that has been approved by DOL, approved to the grantee itself. Okay. So I think we wanted to go back to Becky if we can and spend a few minutes on what I call OJE in action. I want to put her on the spot and ask her if she would share with us a few of her successes and maybe a failure or two – because we really do learn from failures – so we can get a sense of the type of employers that have been used, the kind of positions, how long the OJE was and so forth. MS. SCOTT: All righty. One of the things I Just picked up on, Joyce, when you were talking about using OJE in combination with other trainings, we have done that successfully not this year but last year in CNA training. You know, we actually did classroom training – our people participated in classroom training, they had a community service assignment at a non-profit nursing home that qualified as a host agency and then we were able to develop a very short-term OJE at the end of their training to get them into actual employment. So we’ve had success with using all three methods together. We’ve written I think in our company about 100 OJEs this year. In my region so far we’ve written 14. I’ve only had one that failed. I just had a lady come through here earlier this year saying she was still on the job after two years of her OJE ending and after going into an OJE that she was very scared about going into and didn’t want to and our coordinator convinced her that it was a chance to prove herself. And she wanted her to know how much she appreciated that because she was still working two years later. Some of the types of jobs we’ve done: infant caregiver at daycare centers; clerks and night auditor jobs at hotels/motels; recently customer service reps at various call centers; all kinds of clerk, administrative, receptionist and billing jobs, data entry jobs, including some in the healthcare industry – we’ve been trying to concentrate on those. We’ve had opportunity for janitorial, custodial and maintenance at industrial sites. You know, there’s a lot more today into cleaning and all this with the chemical mixing and prevention of staph and all that. So there’s more technical training that goes into those. We’ve done nursery assistance at plant nurseries. We’ve done home health aid training, security guard training, food service workers, how to operate the cash register, things like that. One of my counterparts in another state in Experience Work said they knew they were successful when they had written several OJEs with one employer in the security business and all of a sudden he said, hey, I just want you to be my direct hire source now. I’m not doing – you know, we don’t need to go the OJE route. They actually earned that employer’s trust as a screening agent pretty much for that employer and his security jobs. So that’s a success. We have had some failures; you know, if we didn’t match the person up right. This is not the thing that you use to push or to highly encourage participants who are sluggish and don’t want training because they’ll blow it. This has to be participants you have that are really excited about this job possibility that you refer to OJEs. You do have to be willing to make adjustments where you can. We’ve had people start an OJE, their spouse becomes critically ill, we have to intervene and put everything on hold for a couple of weeks. We have to modify the contract, extend the dates, rework the training plan, and then they come in later and finish up their training. We kind of have to negotiate on their behalf with the employer. But we turn potential failure to successes that way. If you have a situation where the OJE looks like it’s going to fail, you need to jump on that right away because you don’t want to continue spending your money if it’s going to fail and you don’t want this employer to have a bad taste of you in their mouth. You know, we’ve sometimes – I had this one example where we had a participant who we were giving counselor training in an OJE and she went in there and kind of started telling people how they should run the counseling business. And of course they didn’t want that, so we had to prematurely end that one. That was not a good match – (inaudible). But it’s important to analyze when you do have a failed OJE what went wrong and you’ve got to watch for employers who may want to abuse the system because we also have that. When we had a nursery job – a plant nursery – they were always evaluating our people well but then at the end they wouldn’t hire them for some weird fluke and we had to – we realized they were just trying to get some labor – you know, cheaper labor from us during their high busy season of the planting year. So we don’t work with them anymore and so you have to watch for that. MS. WELSH: Can you talk to us, Becky, about this staff time – the investment of staff time versus outcome. Is it very staff-intensive or does that ease up after a while? MS. SCOTT: I don’t think it’s staff-intensive. You know, the training is not hard. It’s learning your form, making sure you know – and having someone that can help you make corrections if you mess – if you’re not doing it right. That’s one of the things those managers do when they approve it; they look to make sure everything’s filled out right. But the hardest part is the outreach to employers. I think most people are scared to go try to sell this to employers and that’s what we spend the most time with them on. You know, we actually try to give them times to role play with us. We try to teach them when to pitch what model, what signals to pick up on for the models, and then of course there’s some monitoring time. But in my mind if we’re getting our participant an almost guaranteed job because they have a chance to really prove themselves, they’re getting a higher wage, I think it’s worth the time. And I think it’s – I didn’t get to check the statistics on this but I feel pretty confident from what I’ve seen in my people in the follow-ups that these people are also staying on the job longer because they actually had good training there on the site with the employer. So I think it’s worth any investment of time. MS. WELSH: Okay. As Becky said – I just want to reinforce one point and that is the critical nature of the match itself. As with any outreach to the private sector, you really want to play it for success and you want to make sure that you are matching not only an appropriate person but a job – you know, almost job-ready person because you want success both for the participant and for the employer. And again, as Becky said, the proof is always in the pudding. The real job is developing relationships with employers to they’re amenable to contracting with you for OJEs and for other ongoing partnerships to hire your participants. And this will be a topic for a future webinar so stay tuned for that. So we hope we’ve eased some of your doubts that you might have had about the OJE option. We hope we’ve motivated you to give it a try. So tell us what you think. Are you now more likely to try OJE? If you’ll vote now and after you’ve voted tell us what more we can do to help you. Use the chat function and we’ll be here answering your questions also. Anything else we can do to help you get a start on OJE? Because, again, it is your most important tool in this economy to meeting your placement and entered employment goals. MS. GILBERT: Thank you, Joyce and Becky. We’ll give you all a few more seconds to answer the poll and then we’ll go right to questions. And remember to type them into the chat box. A couple of points to be clarified. One person asked, “Do employers for an OJE have to be non-profit or government?” The answer is quite the opposite. This is the one way that you can place people while they’re still in SCSEP with a for-profit employer. So not the non-profit or the government route. “With direct wage payment is there a limit on the number of weeks?” And the answer is yes. There’s the same 12-week limit regardless of which mechanism that you use. Becky, a question for you: “At what point in the SCSEP enrollment do you determine when a participant is an OJE candidate?” MS. SCOTT: Usually that’s IEP-driven. When we know someone’s – it’s kind of odd because you either have OJE opportunities and no participants or you have participants that would be perfect and are job-ready and no opportunities for OJEs. But it’s kind of got – when you have an OJE opportunity you look to your participant list, you look on who you have as job-ready and that has some of the skills – already has some skills that could be built upon to give this employer what they need in the OJE. So it’s different for every participant and for every job, but you’ve got to look at what the employer wants and compare that to what the clientele you have in your participant list and what their current skills are and what their job goals are. And if you’re very lucky you actually have OJEs in an area where you also have participants suitable for OJEs. MS. GILBERT: Great. Thanks. Another detailed kind of question: “How often is the employer reimbursed? Once at the end of the OJE, weekly, biweekly? What’s been your experience?” MS. SCOTT: If ours is less than a month – less than four weeks – we try to encourage them to wait until the end of the OJE for a reimbursement. And if it’s longer than that we try to reimburse every two weeks so we stay on top of the money we owe them and we don’t have outstanding balances out there. MS. GILBERT: And this is a question for both you and/or Joyce: “What advice can you give on key bullet points to point out to perspective employers when discussing the OJE opportunity?” The person has commented that many employers they speak with don’t want the extra work but would rather hire straight out. They try to discuss it but they haven’t been having much success. So how do you sell someone on OJE, I suppose as opposed to – if they’re ready to hire them directly – MS. WELSH: Yeah. MS. GILBERT: – go for that. MS. WELSH: That’s right. I mean, why would you even try to push OJE if you’ve got a direct hire? Really OJE is your foot in the door with new employers to get them to know you and your program and eventually get to where Becky is. They say, forget it; we’ll hire direct. Becky, other than the training subsidy and let us work with you to make sure that your participant is job-ready and knows the ins and outs of your business, those kinds of approaches, how do you do it? MS. SCOTT: Well, naturally we push that we offer mature and experienced individuals that if they’ll just give them a little chance to prove themselves they will be so thankful that they went with this older person. So sometimes that’s when we use a really short OJE. It’s like they don’t really need a lot of training; they just need a chance to demonstrate to that employer what they can do. We talk about no recruiting – we reduce your recruiting costs because we have this big list of participants here that we can pull from to refer to you. We can actually screen for you. If you tell us what you’re – what traits you’re looking for – good communication skills, so many computer skills, and you give me those people then I’ll teach them how to do the rest – well, we can screen our participants for that. We can advertise. It’s a chance to offset your orientation costs and your training costs at the beginning. MS. WELSH: Let me inject right here for a minute. SHRM – the Society for Human Resource Managers – has done research and indicated that it costs two and a half times the salary of an individual to an employer to recruit and train and get them up to snuff past the learning curve. So if you really pitch the real bottom line value of your program, it’s significant. MS. GILBERT: Someone has asked – we said that current host agencies cannot be OJE sites. But can you use as an OJE site a host agency that is not currently a host agency but previously may have been? And the answer is oh, yes. While this is primarily useful for for-profit employers that you can’t use in other – in other way in SCSEP, you certainly can do OJE with non-profits. MS. WELSH: Yeah. Or public. I mean – MS. GILBERT: Yep. MS. WELSH: – if you’re in a smaller town or rural area and the hospital is the major employer there but you’ve never made inroads there, absolutely you can – and it’s a non-profit hospital – you can absolutely do an OJE there. You just cannot have a participant also at the hospital in any place as – you know, as a host agency. MS. GILBERT: Cannot be an active host agency. MS. WELSH: Correct. Active means a participant is there. MS. GILBERT: Right. This question: “Is approval of an OJE contingent on the participants entering a high-demand occupation for that specified workforce region?” The answer is no. However, that is generally where you’re going to find employers that are willing and able to hire people at this point. So that’s probably a good place to look to find potential employers that would be likely OJE candidates for you. Other questions? One question is from a sub-grantee to a state and the national sponsor: “What contracts must be in place between the grantee, sub-grantee and DOL?” The permission to do OJE with what is the plan and what are the sample contracts, et cetera, is between the Department of Labor and the grantee. So if you’re a sub-grantee, you must work with whomever your grantee is and see where they are and make sure that they give the approval to you after they’ve gotten it from the Department of Labor. MS. WELSH: Okay. Here is a question about combining the different services; i.e. classroom training, CSA and OJE. And the individual wants to know if the participant will be paid at different wages, one for CSA time and the other for prevailing wage for OJE. And the answer is yes. And Becky, do you want to talk to us about – you said you had done this a couple times. MS. SCOTT: Well, in the instance – I saw the question pop up and in the instance I referred to they were sequential. You know, we started with the classroom training, then they moved into their assignment in the host agency where they actually – kind of like a clinical, if you want to call it that – and then we wrote the OJE. They were not all simultaneously. But I know we have the capacity to pay at different rates. MS. WELSH: Yeah. I mean, depending on the complexity of your grantee or sub-grantee payroll system they may or may not be happy with you over that, but that’s the way it has to be. MS. GILBERT: Yeah. This can obviously be done and it just causes your accountants to earn their money. MS. WELSH: Yeah. But you might be able to better help an individual become economically self-sufficient. So, you know – MS. GILBERT: So that is the bottom line for all of this. MS. WELSH: That’s right. And your accountant should be happy he or she has a job. Oh, that wasn’t nice. But at any rate – “What do you mean by an OJE opportunity?” is the question. Further, “Explain why don’t you write the dollars into the contract and then determine the employer later? Or do you have to write the employer and the actual job into the contract for pre-approval?” I see. So this is a sub-grantee wanting to get approval from their grantee. And I guess I would say if I was the grantee I would want to see the employer, the actual position; I would like to see a completed contract before giving my approval. But Becky, I’m going to defer to you for direct experience in this. MS. SCOTT: Yeah. Every OJE we write – you know, we might be out there promoting opportunities for OJEs and then when we fall upon one that we think will work, an employer that has an opening that we think we can fill, then we complete the contract and that – it specifies who the employer is, what the wage rate will be, what the hours will be. We fill that out at that time. And then that’s what’s reviewed by my managers before it’s all finalized. But by opportunity, if you’re referring to what I said, that’s what I meant. You may know that you have 10 participants that are job-ready with certain skills and you’re going to go out there and look for OJE opportunities for them, or you may just hit an area that you know has a lot of employers and see if there’s not some openings out there that based on their needs you could find participants to fill with an OJE. MS. GILBERT: Becky, here’s another question for you. “Does writing a lot of OJEs negatively affect meeting the hours of community service performance measure?” MS. SCOTT: I haven’t written enough to tell that it does. We’re meeting our measure so – you know, I’ve written 14 this year. I don’t think that it negatively impacts. I think it comes out of the measure, doesn’t it, Joyce? MS. WELSH: Yeah. I was just going to interject here. OJE is training and, like any training, that is pulled out of the hours so it has no impact at all, just like if you send somebody to a community college. You know, you report your training hours separate from your community service hours. So the answer is no impact whatsoever on that goal. Okay. Here’s a follow-up. It says, “If a state SCSEP finds an OJE opportunity do they need the approval of the national SCSEP before they can go forward?” MS. GILBERT: The answer is yes. Any grantee, whether they’re a state grantee or a national grantee – oh, this may be the – they’re national – MS. WELSH: Yeah. MS. GILBERT: – SCSEP grantee. Every grantee, whether you’re a state or a national, needs the approval of the DOL national office before you can proceed with OJE. MS. WELSH: Okay. I mean, I guess I’m assuming that the state contracts their money to a national. If that’s the question – and whoever asked it can chat right back at me – but if that’s the question then the answer is yes. You know, with the national – wait a minute. Just the opposite. The state funds, the state is grantee so they don’t need anybody’s approval but DOL’s. Okay? I guess the terms that are being used is confusing. Unless, Becky, they mean – like you have state directors as well as locals, in which case you need to approve that state’s OJEs, correct? MS. SCOTT: We had to get approval from our state where we offer a state grant to do OJE. But then – and we had to tell them our process and give them samples of our contracts. MS. WELSH: But that’s because you directly contract with them for their slots. MS. SCOTT: Right. Right. MS. WELSH: Because you are functioning as a sub-grantee at that point. MS. SCOTT: Right. But they don’t review each individual OJE I write; they just bless the process and then we internally approve according to that process. MS. GILBERT: So I think the bottom line to all of this train of questions is that if you’re a sub-grantee you need to work with your grantee and work out whatever arrangements they want to do the OJE. That’s assuming that the grantee has gotten the authorization to move forward with OJE as part of their grant with the Department of Labor. We have had a question about our maintenance of effort issues involved with employers in an OJE. And I must confess that we’re all looking at each other and saying we’re not 100 percent sure of that answer so we’re going to go check it out and get back to you on that. MS. WELSH: Yeah. My gut level says if you know there has been downsizing it’s curious that they’re hiring. So you really would be extra cautious and keep in very close touch to make sure they’re not abusing our program. MS. GILBERT: If they’ve laid someone off, they should bring that person back and not do an OJE. MS. WELSH: Yeah. It would be very curious if they would be at all interested in hiring. MS. GILBERT: Yeah. So at this point you have to assume that the maintenance of effort issues that we talked about on the last webinar are in fact operational here. Do we have a few more questions? MS. : We don’t have any more time. MS. WELSH: Okay. We – MS. GILBERT: Well, I guess we don’t because – we may but we’ve run out of time. MS. WELSH: But we will be answering those questions, yes? MS. GILBERT: Well, you can get those kind of questions to your federal project officer and they will get them to us and we’ll hope that you’re going to find that this is an exciting opportunity to use. So with that I want to say a very warm thank you to both Joyce and Becky for all the work in putting this together, and turning it back over to Brian. MR. KEATING: Thank you so much. All right. And just a few words about the resources again as we wrap up today. So the first thing I want to let you know, which I’m sure many of you do know already, but just so you know Workforce3One is a tool built for you and by you encouraging peer-to-peer learning among the various communities. And the success of Workforce3One really depends on the contributions from people like you. So we’re encouraging you to share your ideas, innovations and more with others. We welcome suggestions for documents to share, programs to feature, and really any relevant information or news that you’d like to exchange with your colleagues. So to submit your content visit the Suggest Content page on the Workforce3One Web space which is located at the URL featured on this slide. And once again, we did record today’s webinar. And please note that all the webinar resources are going to be posted to Workforce3One. The PowerPoint has already been posted, so you can find that through the link in the chat console and you’ll also get that on the Workforce3One Web space. The recording and the transcript are going to be available in two business days. So when you log onto Workforce3One you’re going to click that Resources tab and then you’re going to search by “webinar recordings” to access that in two business days. And once again, you can learn more and stay connected with trends and innovations by logging onto Workforce3One where you’ll find engaging communities of practice where you can share ideas, questions and innovations and connect with others; learn through live Web conference events, such as this one, that feature leaders and experts from industry and from government; and also get a means of registering to be informed of news and events as they occur. So we really encourage you to make note of Workforce3One. It’s a powerful new tool funded by ETA and powered by you. And you can also learn more about the workforce investment system by visiting www.careeronestop.org or by calling 877-US2-JOBS. All right. And with that, on behalf of Workforce3One and today’s webinar presenters I’d like to conclude today’s session by thanking you all for your time and letting you know we really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you on future webinars. Have a great day, everybody. (END)