by Jolene Toves

Guam - Working to ensure Guam's heroes land a job is the Guam Trades Academy. With the island's 600 National Guard soldiers getting ready to return from deployment to Afghanistan reportedly several of them will be coming home with no jobs and will need to seek employment. As part of the preparation the National Guard has reached out to the GCA Trades Academy.

Director Bert Johnston said, "We offer the ability to do some training for them under a variety of different programs and we kind of brainstormed the ideas of what we could do what we offered was for them to come into existing craft training program or apprenticeship programs."

The program is for those who are interested in the construction industry allowing returning soldiers to enter existing crafts training and apprenticeship programs. "We have three programs one of them is craft training program which is our core function and that is basically classroom instruction in the construction trades," he said. "Our craft training program can be a support for an apprenticeship program either their own apprenticeship program for individual company or under a group program."

The third program is an assessment program which allows individuals with four or more years experience in a given craft to be assessed for credentials. "Our program is basically competence based so we test constantly if they claim they have certain experience in certain areas we have an assessment program where we can assess their level of skills find out what their skill gaps are develop a training program specifically for those areas," he said.

Johnston says that GCA Trades Academy has a quick turn over and while it does not have semesters they are able to begin classes in a short amount of time.

For more information contact the GCA Trades Academy at 647-4842.