MOLINE, Ill. — James Bride became a welder at John Deere on April 4, 2022. After two and a half years with the company, he's in the market for a new job.
The laid-off welder spent his Tuesday morning looking for new opportunities at a resource fair in Moline, put on by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
"If you talk to a lot of the old-timers there, they always had a side deal," Bride said. "Because they always knew there was going to be a layoff for a certain period of time, whether it was 10 weeks or whatever it was. You [need to] have a [plan A] and a [plan] B all the time. Deere was always your primary [job], and you always had something else you [did] on a Saturday."
The resource fair is doing its best to serve those unemployed, with a half-dozen recruiters in attendance.
"Right now, the community has been impacted at such a high level," Daniel Marvin, Black Hawk College's Dean of Economics and Workforce Development, said. "We're bringing all these different industries together so the individuals don't have to go around trying to find where is this at or who do I talk to. They can just come here."
It is also offering resources specifically to workers recently laid off at John Deere, like Bride.
"So things like this, particularly when the community is impacted. They're really looking to find an area where they can go to get the next step. And the next step, particularly here at Black Hawk, is to show them the pathway."
The Illinois Department of Employment Security and Black Hawk College will host the fair again on Wednesday, starting at 9 a.m.