Program Retraining Workers for ‘Green’ Economy Graduates First 50 Students

As President Obama prepares to roll out a jobs program in a nationwide address tomorrow, the first 50 people to enroll in a six-month program to retrain workers for jobs in biofuels, sustainable biotechnology, and other cleantech industries are graduating today.

The students began their technical training earlier this year with classes at UC San Diego Extension and Mira Costa College under a two-year, $4-million grant from the California Department of Labor.

“These are the technician positions that are required in the research and development stage, but will also be needed [for] production,” says Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, or SD-CAB. “We also have a program with Mira Costa [community college] which is geared more towards straight production, so those are the real green-collar jobs.”

Mayfield, who also is a co-founder and chairman of the scientific advisory board at the San Diego algal biofuels startup Sapphire Energy, says the emerging green sector will need both technicians and production employees. Ultimately there will be more jobs on the production side as new commercial facilities get built.

“The program is funded by the state as a training development project, meaning the state funded us to develop the certificate program.” Mayfield says. “We get two years for that, and during that phase there is no cost to the students. After that time the program will be run on a tuition basis, [which will cost about] $5,000 per student for the six-month program, and [after] that it should be self-sustaining.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.