You’ve decided the perfect career path for you is in the skilled trades — now what? Good choice. Professions like plumbing, carpentry, and electrician can be lucrative and highly in demand. But how do you get started?
This is where WorkTexas enters the chat. The WorkTexas program provides instruction for adult and high school-age students in two Houston locations to help prepare them to enter numerous trade-based fields.
Since its 2020 start, the program’s skills training — which initially covered subjects such as welding, construction and carpentry, and residential and commercial electrical work — has expanded to include plumbing, HVAC maintenance, and other courses.
In addition to instruction, which was created using input from local employers, WorkTexas provides various types of assistance to help ensure program participants will successfully reach their educational and vocational goals. Staff members, for instance, help prospective students identify applicable grants and scholarships. Many, WorkTexas Co-Founder Mike Feinberg says, are able to attend the program for no cost.
“Basically, in this country, if someone is unemployed or underemployed, they can get help to learn a new trade,” Feinberg says. “Unfortunately, we make it more difficult than it needs to be to access. It gets bucketed into these smaller grants; we help people navigate that.”
Continued Encouragement and Support
Through federal and local funding and public-private partnerships, WorkTexas has been able to supply daycare for more than 60 children of program participants and other community members, according to Yazmin Guerra, WorkTexas’ vice president of workforce development.
“People need childcare to be able to go to work,” Guerra says. “It’s a childcare desert in the area we’re at. The majority of the people [here] are low-income, so they would qualify; and the [WorkTexas] team members support the parent in completing the necessary applications to qualify.”
The program also works with other organizations to help connect students to supplementary support.
After students graduate from the program, WorkTexas staffers continue to provide ongoing communication and guidance, staying in touch with graduates for at least five years, reaching out approximately every six months, Feinberg says, to both assess the program’s impact and provide additional advice, if needed.
“[We’re asking], are you looking for a different job? What’s your salary? Do you need any help?” Mike Feinberg shares. “It is job coaching, which can be technical, or it can also turn into therapy at times. We make a commitment to help them not just get the job — we’re interested in what [their life] looks like, in terms of career contentment, and especially earning power and creating sustainable lives for themselves, their families, and future generations.”
Graduates sometimes reach out to WorkTexas to ask how to handle workplace and career challenges.
“We’re also reacting when they call in and [say], ‘I just had a fight with my boss,’ [or] ‘There’s another opening across the street; do you think I should apply for it?’” Mike Feinberg says. “We’re having those conversations with people, too. Keeping the job [and] advancing [your] career is 30% technical skills, 70% soft skills.”
