The Community College of Baltimore County is the latest local institution to step up in supporting workers displaced by cuts from the Trump administration.

At a career fair Saturday in Catonsville, CCBC staff sat one-on-one with recently unemployed Marylanders to offer resume and application assistance. Yvette Bunn Jones, assistant vice president of HR, said she also wants to connect attendees with over 60 roles currently open at the school in enrollment services, information technology and more.

“We have a number of people who have worked for the federal government for years — 10,15, 20 years — and they haven't done a resume before,” Bunn Jones told WYPR. “They have not had to apply for jobs, and they are working in very specialized roles within the federal government, and they're having a difficult time matching the job that they did with the jobs and the titles of positions that are available.”

Bunn Jones said there are over one-thousand more applicants seeking jobs at CCBC this year than there were at the same time last year. In early March, officials from the state’s Bureau of Revenue Estimates predicted about 28,000 federal workers in Maryland would lose their jobs because of Trump cuts — and that’s not counting contractors or people whose roles rely on federal grants.

Angela Thomas took an offer this week to resign from her role as a community planner at the Department of Transportation come September because of layoffs she expects are coming.

“I am experiencing the turmoil within the federal employment environment, an impossible rift going on with my agency,” she said. “So I came here to figure out some potential opportunities for me in the future.”

Thomas said a CCBC staff member helped condense her nearly ten-page-long resume and match her skills and desires with open positions.

“I had frowned about coming here to a career event, because I've been to a couple of career events, and I told my husband, ‘You don't find a job there,’” she said. “But this was a little different. I had somebody actually sit there and help me. Normally at career fairs, they don't go that deep.”

The fair wasn’t just for federal workers.

Adriana Rosas lost her job as a college and career advisor for Forest Park High School in Baltimore City on Friday, after the Trump administration announced that it will not be reimbursing up to $418 million in COVID-era relief funds spent in Maryland schools.

Rosas said she’s most worried about her students, who now have only one postsecondary advisor to be shared among over 800 peers.

“The more adults that you have working with students, the better off they are. So it's definitely going to negatively impact them,” she told WYPR. “I’ve been there for six years, and I provide a lot of the bilingual services and translation for the students and the families. So I know that that'll be hard too.”

Rosas said she wants to keep working with first-generation college-goers, like she once was. That’s why she came to find openings at CCBC.

“I think that sometimes community colleges can get a bad rep from kids like, ‘Oh, something wrong had to happen for me to go to community college,’” she said. “But I tell students all the time that is not true. You could go to community college to save money. You can go to community college because you're still trying to figure out what you want to do.”

Bunn Jones said this is the type of “mutually beneficial” connection CCBC is trying to foster.

“We have a population of folks who are trying to meet one of their basic needs, which is the ability to earn income, take care of themselves, take care of their families,” she said. “And we have a need to fill positions.”

Bunn Jones said she’s also planning to host a series of “virtual pop-up” trainings this spring on topics such as Microsoft Teams interviews, which many long-time federal workers have never had to do.

CCBC President Sandra Kurtinitis said the college also offers tuition-free job training and certification courses, like their teacher preparation program, for workers hoping to shift careers.

“So in six to eight months, someone who's been performing some function for the federal government, has maybe a master's degree or a bachelor's degree, our training program can prepare them to take that knowledge and be able to be in the classroom effectively,” she said.

That’s in line with a push from Governor Wes Moore and the state department of education to employ displaced workers by filling Maryland educator vacancies.