Pima County receives federal bioscience job training grant

June 10, 2005

By hammersmith

Pima Community College and local employers are the recent recipients of a $276,393 grant from the U.S. Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to help bolster southern Arizona’s bioscience workforce.

Of 230 applicants, Job Path, Inc. and Pima Community College were chosen to receive the federal Biotechnology Industry Demonstration Grant, which will be pooled with $185,710 matching dollars to build up the local bioscience industry through a summer education institute and job training programs.

The grant proposal is a direct answer to needs laid out in Arizona’s Bioscience Roadmap. The Roadmap highlights a dearth of skilled laboratory workers and biomedical technicians to staff Arizona’s growing biosciences sector, and calls for measures to grow that pool of workers. The grant will fund 50 graduates of the Biotechnology Summer Institute, 60 graduates of the new Pima Community College biotechnology program, and 30 paid internships with local biosciences employers,

The plan is part of the Bush Administration’s High Growth Job Training Initiative, which targeted health care and bioscience in 2003 and 2004 as emerging industries in need of workforce development. As part of this strategic workforce building, the ETA awarded a little more than $12 million in job training grants to 12 different programs nationwide.

Other Arizona partners of Job Path Inc. include the Pima County One-Stop Career Center, Office of the Pima County Superintendent of Schools, BIO5, Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), the Arizona BioIndustry Association, the Bioindustry Organization of Southern Arizona, La Paloma Family Services, and Flinn Foundation.


For more information:

High Growth Job Training Initiative