Video Transcript
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Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of The Working Lunch. My name is Mikayla Tucker-Davis and I’m your host. And during today’s session, we’re going to take a tour of MassHire Central Career Center, my office, located at 554 Main Street, Suite 300. And during this session, we’ll take you behind some of the scenes on what we do here at the Career Center and some of the services that are beneficial to all residents of Central Mass.
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So, hello, my name is Janice Ryan Weekes. I’m the Executive Director of MassHire Central Career Centers. We have a Career Center in Southbridge on Mechanic Street, 14 Mechanic Street, and we’re also here in Worcester, 554 Main Street, right across from Hanover Theatre. We are so excited to be a part of your process, wherever you may be on your job search or as a business owner looking for talent. We’re here to serve both populations. And it makes sense, right, because you both want to be connected and join together. So, I have a wonderful staff, bilingual, and a few languages. So, please come down and learn about our funding for training, you know, what we do in terms of onsite job fairs. We have a lot of virtual offerings as well, workshops included. So, the best thing to do is check us out on our website or come on down. Walk-ins welcome, right here at MassHire Central.
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Once you arrive to MassHire, you’ll be greeted by our lovely reception team who will be able to assist you with signing up for our Career Center Seminar and registering you for a Job Seeker membership.
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Here at MassHire, we live by four main values: ingenuity, reliability, collaboration, and respect. This hallway displays those values so that job seekers can see what we work towards every day to support them on their journey.
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Right now, we’re standing outside of the resource room at MassHire. I’m going to take you in so you can see some of the equipment that’s available to job seekers as they go about their job readiness journey. Come with me.
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One of the major benefits that we offer job seekers is an all-access resource room, which means that job seekers have the right to come in and utilize our computers, printers, resume paper, or any other resources to support job seekers on their job readiness journey. One of the other major features in our resource room is that we have an online learning lab, which allows job seekers to build soft skills in utilizing Microsoft Office tools and other web applications.
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We’re going to check in with our veteran representative, Bill Ryan. Come with me. Hey, Bill. How are you? Hi. How are you? Good. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here at the Career Center and your role? Absolutely. We’d be happy to. My name is Bill Ryan. I’m a veteran service representative for the MassHire Career Center. I’ve been here for 33 years now. And what our job duty is is to provide employment and training and support services to all veterans in the central Mass region. We work with veterans with severe barriers to employment, and it’s our job to remove those barriers and make them productive citizens in society. Thank you so much, Bill, for giving us a little information. So you would encourage all veterans who need services to come in and see you. Absolutely. We have all veterans coming here that need any of those services that I just mentioned. And they get priority of service. All veterans that come into this Career Center and all Career Centers nationally get priority of service. Come on down.
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So on the next stop of our tour at MassHire Career Centers, here we have our RESEA supervisor, Aida Aponte, who will tell us a little bit about her role here at the Career Center and what she does in her everyday-to-day operations. Hi. My name is Aida Aponte. I am a job specialist, also a RESEA supervisor here at the MassHire Career Center’s Worcester office. And for the most part, I just manage the staff members on my team as well as support our job seekers with the RESEA programs and employment counseling.
And on our next stop of our tour of MassHire Central Career Centers, we’ll be speaking with Business Services Representative, Yesenia Aponte, who will tell us a little bit more of her role that she plays when working with employers and connecting them to job seekers. Hello. My name is Yesenia Aponte, and I’m the Business Service Rep here in the MassHire Career Center in Worcester. I help businesses by connecting them with job seekers that are in need of work. And I do that by facilitating job fairs, recruitment events, job postings. I also connect businesses with any services that might be available in the central area, like for example, grant opportunities for training, any other services. So if you have any questions or if you would like to have our service, come on down and we will work with you.
And the last person we’ll be speaking with here at MassHire is Operations Manager, Jibrael Younis, who will tell us a little bit more about his day to day role here at the Career Center and some of the programs that he oversees to support job seekers and employers in Central Mass. Hello. So my name is Jibrael Younis. I’m an Operations Manager here at MassHire in Worcester. Even though I oversee some staff and programs that also take place in our Southbridge Career Center, I like to think that my day to day role is basically supporting my staff in any way I can. I like to think of my role as someone who wants to make things more efficient here at the Career Center, increase our optimization, I guess, of success and successful outcomes. I try to make sure that my staff are comfortable and confident in what they’re doing. So really, I’m a support person. That’s how I look at my role. It’s whatever I can do to help my staff. The programs that they’re working on, they’re really doing a lot of the work, all the work, I would say, too, and they do a great job. So I really am fortunate. I have really great staff people on my teams. I supervise about 12 people, sometimes a little bit more, depending on what programs are happening at the time. Mainly, we look at supporting our job seekers through training opportunities. So the overarching program is called WIOA, the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act Program. Basically, it provides grant-funded training opportunities to job seekers who need to upskill their abilities to be marketable in the workplace. Say people want to go get a CDL truck driving license, or they want to become a nurse, or they want to get some computer skills, we can pay for them to go to training so that they can get the skills to meet the needs of area employers. That’s the big program that I work on. I also support the business services team in looking at long-term projects and engaging employers. I also support some smaller grant programs that support specific demographic groups, like say, people who are receiving Section 8 housing vouchers, or programs that are working with people that are also going to different kind of trainings that are funded through different grants, like the Future Skills Program through the state of Massachusetts, as funded through the American Rescue Plan. All these little different programs come together to just try to make sure we have as many entry points for job seekers to come and work with us. We get referrals from community-based organizations. We get referrals by sending our staff out into the community and tabling different locations, such as the library, to try to make sure that people know about MassHire Services. So that’s what I do. I’m a support staff in my mind. I’m someone who tries to help keep the vision, keep the team focused on the mission, but also, again, I’m just here to help my staff. I really don’t have a role other than that to be honest on paper, so it’s just to help everyone else around me and bring the team towards success.
And that concludes our tour of MassHire Central Career Center. But before we go, I just wanted to pop upstairs to the Workforce Board to see our friend, Bruce Mendelsohn. Thanks, Mikayla. By now, you guys have had a great tour of the Career Center, and there isn’t much to add up on the Workforce Board, except for we’re really thrilled to work with our friends down at the Career Center in offering some of these really important services to job seekers and to partners throughout our service area in the city of Worcester and the 38 surrounding towns and communities. And when you come to visit us, please don’t forget that we’re on the fourth floor and the Career Center is on the third floor. So thanks very much, and good luck.
And that concludes another great episode of the Working Lunch.
