One-Stop Career Centers
February 2 2006
Looking for a job is no simple matter. But the One-Stop Career Centers, created by the federal Workforce Investment Act of 1998, try to facilitate the process by pulling together in one location many of the services jobseekers rely on.
Under the auspices of ILR’s Winter Intersession Program (WISP), eight Cornell undergraduates, including seven from ILR and one from the College of Arts and Sciences, learned first hand how these centers operate. They spent three weeks during winter break working as interns at career centers affiliated with the departments of labor in New York and Massachusetts. There they shadowed employment specialists, interviewed jobseekers, and kept abreast of news stories about layoffs, unemployment benefits, job training programs, and relevant economic and political policy.
The students capped off their experience by writing reports based on their observations of the one-stop centers and their own research. On January 31, they presented their results to a small group of ILR faculty and representatives from the NYS Department of Labor.
The internship is sponsored by Dr. Harold Oaklander (ILR ‘52), director of the Alliance for the Prevention of Unemployment, who also conceived of and personally organizes this WISP opportunity.
