Located in Lennox, California, the CCTP offers eight-week pre-apprenticeship construction training and employment services at no cost to men and women transitioning from unemployment, welfare, low-income jobs, or incarceration. The program has trained more than 2,200 Southland residents and has placed in construction trades more than 1,600 of them—12% of who are women, almost double the national average. More than 85% of these placements are in high paying union jobs.

The Century Community Training Program was created in 1998 to act as the primary job training program for the Alameda Corridor project.

Formed through a partnership between the private nonprofit corporation Century Housing, the Carpenters Educational Training Institute, and the Alameda Corridor Jobs Coalition, CCTP ensured that residents who lived in the fifteen-city corridor would be trained to help build the 10-mile truck and rail trench (finished in 2002) that would link the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the transcontinental rail yards east of downtown Los Angeles.

Previously, Century and its State predecessor, the Century Freeway Housing Program, had been responsible for ensuring that women and minorities received training, contracts, and employment in both the construction of the Century Freeway (I-105) and in the new housing program. (Read Century’s full history here.)

Creating CCTP formalized the job training process, and Century became the new administrator of it. Under the Alameda Corridor contract CCTP trained 880 residents—16 percent of them women—and placed more than 680 graduates in construction jobs.

In 2001, CCTP was officially accredited by California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education and was named an EPIC (Exemplary Public Interest Contribution) Award Winner by the U.S. Department of Labor for supporting the Department’s mission of bridging the gender gap in construction skills. Also in 2001, funded by a grant from the State of California Employment Training Panel, CCTP partnered with Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) to train and place residents of the LAX service area.

Since its inception, CCTP has received grants from the California Workforce Investment Act, the California Employment Training Panel, the U.S Department of Labor’s Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program, and the California Endowment.

Find out what CCTP has been doing most recently on our News page.