Clark earns $10M federal workforce training grant

Photo | Grant Welker Clark University's Robert Hutchings Goddard Library

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Clark University in Worcester has secured a $10-million federal grant for workforce training in industries including information technology, advanced manufacturing, and transportation.

Clark, which announced the funding Thursday, was one of 19 recipients nationwide and the only one in Massachusetts. Its share of $145 million in funds from the U.S. Department of Labor will establish a partnership called the TechBoost Program to include the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, the City of Worcester and the MassHire workforce development office in Worcester.

The grant will help partners far beyond the Worcester area. CareerSource Tampa Bay, a workforce development office in Florida and Florida Career College, as well as Partner4Work, a similar agency in Pittsburgh, are part of the TechBoost Program. Two Florida information technology firms are also a part: OwnForce and Lucravalde.

Others closer to Worcester include Public Consulting Group in Boston, a MassHire office in Boston, and Holyoke Community College in Western Massachusetts.

Clark's role as the lead partner will be to help prepare 800 people — either already in the workforce, underemployed or unemployed — advance in their careers, including through on-the-job training, paid internships and apprenticeship programs. The federal grant program is part of the Department of Labor's H1-B program, a classification for immigrants who are able to work in the United States if they're in a specialty industry. In Massachusetts in particular, those jobs are often in high-demand fields including software, information technology and engineering.

Clark said in a statement announcing the funding it aims to fill jobs including security analyst, software developer and data analyst, and it would target workers displaced by the coronavirus pandemic in particular.

The university secured a similar $12 million grant in August 2019 to provide information-technology apprenticeships to at least 5,000 people over four years across eight states, including Massachusetts.