This program in Fremont is reskilling people who lost their jobs during the pandemic

Now she is back to work full time at the factory, having already worked her way up to a job as a lead coordinator on the assembly line, doing quality checks on hundreds of test kits a day

“You have to be fast,” Kolar said, since her group assembles and inspects up to 500 test kits for shipment daily.

The pilot program, called Earn and Learn Fremont, saw 17 people with no manufacturing background complete an eight week training course that included six weeks of on-site classwork at Evolve, through Ohlone, on the basics of manufacturing and safety. Fourteen members of the cohort went on to work at Evolve while three others got jobs at other manufacturers in the area.

With millions of Americans still out of work and many jobs still going unfilled, the program is a snapshot of how people who lost work during the pandemic can reskill in a new field, even without a college degree.

Charleen Elliott’s sales job at an event center in Livermore came to an abrupt halt when shelter-in-place orders came down in March of last year. That forced her onto unemployment until she started the training program at Evolve in February. She’s now a coordinator and quality controller at Evolve.

Elliott said it was stressful not being able to work for almost a year. “I was hoping to hear back from my old boss about when we could come in.” But that call never came for Elliott, who, like many others who lost their jobs because of the pandemic, was facing the question of how to build new skills to find work in a still recovering economy.

The hardest hit industries have begun adding back jobs statewide — leisure and hospitality tacked on more than 60,000 between March and April — but are not back to where they were a year ago. Many industries like events and entertainment could take longer to recover, leaving professionals like Elliott to make other plans.

Job openings continue to pile up across the Bay Area and the U.S. as the recovery ramps up, but sluggish hiring numbers found that American employers added just 266,000 jobs in April, down from more than 900,000 in March and well below expectations, complicating the employment picture. The reasons for that are complex, running from care duties like Kolar’s that disproportionately fall on women, to skills gaps and pay issues for lower-wage jobs.

In Fremont however, there are plenty of entry-level manufacturing jobs to be had, according to Tina Kapoor, the city’s economic development manager who worked to set up the program with Evolve and Ohlone along with local workforce development boards.

“In Fremont advanced manufacturing is a major sector,” Kapoor said. She said many of Fremont’s more than 900 manufacturers are currently hiring — including battery maker Enovix, Lam Research, Owens Design and electric car-maker Tesla, among others.

Kapoor said many companies are looking for entry level employees, while others have openings in more advanced roles designing new products that require more experience.

Statewide manufacturing hiring ticked up only slightly between March and April, according to the state’s Employment Development Department, although those companies have added more than 45,000 jobs since April of last year.

Evolve’s Senior Director of Operations Matt Pawluk said the company isn’t making the 35,000 test kits per day like it was at the height of the pandemic last year, but the facility is still churning out tens of thousands per day along with antibody tests, ventilators and a range of other medical devices.

Pawluk said the group that went through the program is now making $18 per hour sterilizing, assembling and inspecting the test kits. He said each has been hired as a temporary employee, and wasn’t clear if the jobs had a set end date.