WHAT IS A ONE-STOP?

Through the collaborative efforts of federal, state, county, local agencies, and business the Orange County One-Stop Centers were designed to meet the needs of the employer and job seeker.  These Centers are intended to provide a more coordinated, customer-friendly, locally driven workforce development system.  Most of the services and resources are free due to federal funding; however, some services could be offered on a fee basis.

The One-Stop planning and development process was initiated in November 1994 with funding from the U.S. Department of Labor due to the following reasons:

• The average employee will change jobs six times during their lifetime.  This has led to a national need to focus on employability since workers are no longer staying in their jobs with one company for their lifetime.
• Workers are required to take on a greater variety of tasks with the advent of more businesses becoming "high performance" workplaces.  This leads to their need for improved basic skills and literacy, English language, computational, work readiness, and flexibility training.
• Since we are in an era of high-tech, global, and increasing competitiveness, jobs are increasingly requiring rapidly changing skill sets leading to life-long learning for all workers.

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) legislation of 1998 further defines the vision of the One-Stop Centers to provide the following:

• Universal Services - To offer employer, job seeker, and education/training seekers a wide array of useful information, as well as widespread and easy access to needed services.
• Integrated Systems - To provide as many job seeking and employment retention skills, education, or occupational skill training services as possible for unified customer service.
• Customer Choice - To consider the needs and interests of customers in all aspects of service delivery and support informed choices by providing a means for customers to judge quality of services.
• Performance Driven/Outcome Based - To meet and exceed clearly identified and measurable outcomes.

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