Saturday, October 03, 2009

Ellegood: Shuttle workforce help already in motion

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of guest posts from experts involved in the area's transition from the space shuttle to a future fleet of space vehicles. Today, Edward Ellegood writes about work to help employees soon to lose their jobs in the space shuttle program. We'll have more from people involved with the Aerospace Workforce Transition Program in the coming weeks and months.

The first major Shuttle worker layoffs are slated for October, and local stakeholders are not waiting to step up efforts to help find positions for about 600 people. Brevard Workforce just pulled the trigger on their first round of outreach with a massive email campaign to Central Florida businesses inside and outside of Brevard County. The campaign is designed to market the unique detail-oriented talent that will soon be available to area companies and organizations, whether they are in aerospace or not.
Brevard Workforce's ongoing Aerospace Workforce Transition program has been helping to counsel, retrain and find positions for individual Shuttle workers. But now, with the first wave of separations in sight, the agency is engaging full-on promotions to assist both workers and employers, and to prevent the permanent loss of highly skilled individuals from Central Florida talent pool.

Employers can now tap into employflorida.com to find and review qualified candidates. As would be expected, the coming layoffs will impact all sorts of engineers and technicians, but they will also include large numbers of business and facilities-focused people such as managers, planners, administrators, IT, security, and clerical workers.

Employers can go to to http://www.employflorida.com/ or contact Erika Feltz at (321) 394-0544 or efeltz@brevardworkforce.com. More on Brevard Workforce’s efforts to help the Shuttle workforce is at http://www.launchnewcareers.com/.

Edward Ellegood is a space policy analyst at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, with offices at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. He edits the FLORIDA SPACErePORT blog.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Brevard is going under if Congress does not approve the funds. There will not be many high-tech jobs in Brevard anymore for a long time. The Space Center started it and can end it. Sea Ray - Closed, Collins cut back hours, Harris lays off 100 Engineers, and now Brevard is trying to boast tourism. HA! There are better beaches to see and not having a running Space Program will not bring in too many tourist...