One-Stop Career Centers Are Open for Business.

• Author: Clark, Charles S.

In Minnesota, state agencies are Cooperating to offer a variety of employment services in a single location. It's just what Congress had in mind when it passed the 1998 Workforce Investment Act.

At the South Minneapolis WorkForce Center in an inner city neighborhood, the most important employee may be the receptionist. It is she, or he, who makes that crucial first impression and performs initial screening of the center's "customers," who run the gamut from the recently laid off to the disabled to the corporate recruiter to the middle-class careerist seeking new directions.

Though customers may not know it, there is advantage to the fact that the receptionist does not represent a particular state program or office. The center is what is known informally as a "one-stop," one of 53 now open under the auspices of Minnesota's Department of Economic Security. Under a single roof at each one-stop are representatives from state and local agencies that handle unemployment insurance benefits (Minnesotans call it "re-employment insurance"), vocational rehabilitation, services for the blind, veterans' benefits, employment services, income maintenance, employment training and more.

No longer must citizens navigate a labyrinth of unfamiliar agency names and programs to find public employment and training services. They can walk in and explore a host of computerized job listings, training videos, counseling services and resume-writing tutorials. They can even use telephones and fax machines to pursue job leads.

CREATING A SHOWCASE

Because Minnesota's system is among the nation's most advanced, it is being showcased to visiting officials from around the country. All 50 states are now revamping employment and training programs as a result of last year's landmark federal Workforce Investment Act. That law calls for a workforce development system built around the needs, not of separate program bureaucracies, but of individual citizens negotiating today's changing economy.

"It's a huge shift," says visitor John Dorrer of the new law. He is deputy director of Workforce Development Programs at the Washington, D.C.-based National Center on Education and the Economy. "The new centers will offer re-employment services to all American workers and give them more job training choices."

Dorrer says most states have a "good head start" in getting ready to implement the federal law by the July 2000 deadline.

But it won't be easy. Problems facing one-stops include...