Philly job service agencies merging

Two parallel government agencies - both designed to help unemployed Philadelphians get jobs - have been integrated into one, with the first job search center holding reopening ceremonies Thursday morning.

"We should be able to provide seamless service," said Mark Edwards, president and chief executive of Philadelphia Works, speaking at the opening of the newly organized CareerLink office in Center City. Philadelphia Works, the funnel for national, state, and city workforce dollars, oversees the job search centers.

For years, unemployed people on welfare would get job search help through what were known as EARN centers. And for years, unemployed people whose factories closed, or who were laid off, or who wanted to change jobs, would turn to CareerLink.

The services offered to job seekers were similar, yet dispatched by parallel sets of employees.

Job recruiters from each organization separately contacted employers, offering to help them with hiring needs.

The upshot was confusion among employers, who wound up not using either system.

That was a chief criticism leveled in a 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts Philadelphia Research Initiative report about the workforce system. The report, mirroring findings of an in-house report, found that even corporate executives on the boards of the two agencies didn't use the systems to recruit for their companies.

Now those functions will be merged under the CareerLink name.

"I think this is the way to go," said Kathy Manderino, acting state secretary of labor and industry.

Indeed, new federal legislation, passed last year, requires it.

Only Lancaster County has already integrated the operations of the two parallel groups; some counties, including Chester County, have the two groups in the same building, but have not completely integrated the services.

In Philadelphia, the Center City CareerLink, on the second floor of the Suburban Station building, is the first of the city's four centers to be integrated, consolidating operations from the former CareerLink at Ninth and Spring Garden Streets, which is being phased out and will close June 19.

Each of the centers will be managed by a different agency, but the work of all four agencies as well as outreach to businesses will be coordinated by Educational Data Systems Inc., based in Dearborn, Mich.