The Veterans Retraining Assistance Program (VRAP) offers a renewed opportunity for education/training and job assistance to unemployed Veterans 35-60 years old. As of this week there have been over 117,000 applicants.
We have notified over 101,000 Veterans that they are approved to begin training (through a Certificate of Eligibility-COE) and, to date over 47,000 have begun their training towards a high demand career field.
VRAP is a joint program between VA and Department of Labor however; the successful outreach of VRAP was a much larger community endeavor. Many represent our stakeholders, community partners, and Veterans Service Organizations who helped us reach out to this deserving population.
The challenge now is ensuring that Veterans who have received notification of approval, a COE, start their training as soon as feasible. According to the law that established VRAP, the program expires March 31, 2014, so it’s important that training is initiated/and completed by that date.