Helping Put Pharmaceutical Workers Back To Work

There’s good news for former Pharma workers in the Garden state.

The Christie Administration has announced the availability of 2-point-6 million dollars in grant funding to retrain and help find new employment for many individuals who have lost their jobs in the pharmaceutical industry since 2010.

The funding is being made available to Jersey from the latest allocation of a 3-point-.6 million dollar National Emergency Grant that the State Department of Labor and Workforce Development applied for and obtained 2 years ago from the U.S. Department of Labor, to help ensure displaced workers from the pharmaceutical industry get the assistance and job training they need to find new positions.

Jersey Labor Commissioner Hal Wirths says “this funding is available for short term education and training grants at many colleges and universities in New Jersey to help this important segment of our workforce transition into other high-skill sectors of the economy.  This retraining will not only help put people back to work faster in good-paying jobs, but help maintain one of our state’s greatest assets – our highly educated, skilled workforce – and strengthen our emerging life-science and bio-tech industry.”

An initial 1 million dollar installment received in 2010 had been tied only to training for pharma workers who had been laid off from eight specific locations. But the USDOL has agreed to a request by the LWD to greatly expand the list of qualifying locations, which means many more displaced pharma workers may be eligible for this latest allocation of training funds.

Qualified candidates can receive up to 5 thousand dollars in education grants or other opportunities, and are being urged to take advantage of this unique opportunity to enroll in a course that can help them to move into another job.