Nov 9

Nov 9 Taking Care Of Business

Employ Prince George’s Works To Maintain Its Core Mission In Spite Of Pandemic

By Raoul Dennis

The following is an interview with Employ Prince George’s Executive Director Walter Simmons. Like the county, Simmons and his office were on trajectory before Coronavirus hit Prince George’s. Although the virus force County leaders to make considerable course alterations in operation, Simmons and his team never lost sight of their pre-pandemic plans. Instead, they made adjustments and moved forward.

Some Information About Employ Prince George’s

Simmons: Through our comprehensive job center in Largo we see over 24,000 people per year. We have 40 partners in our network. Over the past three years, we have increased the traffic flow by 30%. That is helping to decrease our unemployment rate. That helps with veterans, older workers (55 & older)*, returning citizens.

During our 50 plus job fair, we saw over 500 people in one day. A lot of people don’t realize that there are a lot of resources that we provide with our over 40 partners. Click here to learn how Employ Prince George’s is working today to aid employers in covering the salaries of new and re-hires in the county.

Below is an early 2020 Prince George’s Suite Interview with Mr. Simmons in his own voice:

“Prince George’s County has led Maryland in Job growth over the past five years. We have all the economic development drivers in the county. The financial packages help to grow those jobs. Some 20 – 30% of the people there are hired because of that package. That’s how we are helping to decrease our outbound commuters.

Employ Prince George’s is the element in helping the businesses hire skilled Prince Georgians to fill those positions.

Secondly, outside of the government incentives, Employ Prince George’s connects with 1,000 businesses per year. We help the company to recruit Prince George’s County residents. They don’t have the money to post jobs or do marketing campaigns to recruit new talent. So, we do that for small to mid-size businesses. We match them with Prince George’s County residents.

We try to place between 7 -10,000 people in jobs per year. We also have the Talent Development Fund. A lot of the job seekers have severe barriers to employment. So we have completed the talent development fund to help invest in developing in their skill sets.

We get them to the employers who hire county residents who may not have the highest skill set but have a positive attitude and aptitude. We will reimburse the business for the time that they are training that new hire. We have about $250,000 per year to hire those residents through our talent development fund.

Also, businesses that have a contract with county government, are required to hire a certain number of county residents ---depending on the value of the contract. So we help them meet the local hire requirement and hire residents. We work with those companies to IFD those workers.

K. Neal Truck and busing is one of our largest corporate partners. Their ultimate thrust is to hire local people. They’re dedicated to it. They’re one of the largest black-owned companies in Maryland. We work with Steven Neal. They also hire returning citizens.

We do over 500 community events per year. We do social media. Outreach and recruitment team.

I think smaller businesses have a lot to look forward to. Workforce development incentives has a lot of them. A small business can get up to 90% of that new hire salary reimbursed. Additionally, we work with the small business. The mom & pop shops can use our funding to create an in-house training space to build this small business and give them the training capacity for a larger business.

We have 17 funding streams. We are nonprofit. All of our fed money goes to the state before it comes to Prince George’s. So what we have done is to allow the funding source to be leveraged by the foundations and other sources – private sector, etc --- to increase the resources n Prince George’s. A lot of others have downsized their workforce operations whole Prince George’s is expanding.

A lot of people don’t realize that we have $250,000 to help local business hire local people. Visit our website. We encourage local hiring. We are not paying the whole salary for a year. It might cover someone for three months. Three months at 75% of salary might be $6,000---that’s now 41 businesses that can hire people for that period.

If you compare that others who don’t even have a talent development fund, it’s significant and makes a difference. We are going into our second year and we hope to grow it. We have people from India and Thailand visit Prince George’s because they are studying our employment services programs as a model.”