Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

In today's competitive job market, finding a good position is hard enough if you're an American with a college degree. It's harder still if you're a newly arrived Soviet emigre who hasn't had access to new technology and is unaccustomed to American corporate culture.

At a one-day conference last week organized by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in San Francisco, directors of local technical training programs addressed how to prepare refugees for the high-technology world. About 40 professionals from Jewish agencies around the country attended at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.

With its thriving high-tech community, the Bay Area has become a nationwide model for placing emigres in scientific fields.

"We've always found it to be rather an odd irony, that part of the Stalinist legacy in the former Soviet Union was a preponderance of Jews in engineering and technical fields," said moderator Abby Snay, executive director of San Francisco's Jewish Vocational Service.

With a little adjustment, emigres could be "highly successful throughout the high-technology field," she said. "It just takes training in English, specific training in technical skills and some work in bridging to the American world."

Other panelists confirmed Snay's optimism.

"Every year that my program has been in existence, I've had emigres participating in it and they've been very successful," said Celeste Carter, director of a biotechnology program at Foothill College in Los Altos.

Carter recalled that when she started the nine-month vocational program at Foothill four years ago, she worried that students without degrees might not find work. "I used to wake up with anxiety attacks because every company I knew required a bachelor's degree before they'd consider someone for an entry-level technical position," she said.

But by providing "some very specific biotechnology courses that address the needs in Silicon Valley," Carter has been able to "make the students very marketable," she said. "I'm now approached by companies who ask me to bring them the resumes of students with good laboratory skills."

Carter urged the audience to look beyond obvious choices when placing candidates in technical jobs.

"Don't rule out biopharmaceutical or biotechnology companies if you have engineering candidates," she said. She cited the example of the Stanford Human Genome Center, a biotech company with a large staff of robotics engineers that supports the company's bioengineering work.

For Cyndi Cravens, program director of computer-aided design (CAD) training at JVS, it was important to begin training candidates from the ground up.

"Many of our clients start off not knowing computers at all," she said. "So in the first lesson, the instructor begins by laying a computer on the floor, then taking it apart and pointing out what the pieces of equipment are."

It was also important to support technical training with classes on language and culture, said Cravens. "In our CAD programs…we also teach people about the American workforce, how American engineers interact with one another," she said. "And of course, we provide the English terminology that reinforces the concepts of CAD as the students go through the training."

Though placement rates had been affected by California's recession, Cravens said, "we've at least been able to maintain a 60 percent placement rate over the last six years." Since many of the students didn't own cars, it was difficult for them to reach jobs in Silicon Valley, she added.

"But a good number of them still manage to do it."

This was not such a problem for emigres already living in Silicon Valley, said Carol Gopin, executive director of Jewish Family Services of Santa Clara County in Los Gatos.

"However, they carpool to get to some of our classes," Gopin said.

Zoya Lazer, director of the JFS vocational services program and a former refugee herself, shared tips on how to run such a program.

Classes, she said, were "very concentrated and focused on the essentials of each profession." They were also taught by "professionals with direct experience in industry, [and] themselves former refugees from the former Soviet Union."

Like Foothill College, JFS has constantly redesigned its program "in response to Silicon Valley needs," Lazer said. The agency's computer classes include "basic skills like keyboarding, DOS, Windows 95 and Microsoft Office" and more advanced classes in programs such as Visual Basic, C++ and HTML.

"We put a lot of effort into the design of our program," Lazer said. But the effort pays off. "The main achievement of ours is that with special computer retraining, our clients are off cash assistance and doubling and tripling their salaries within a year or two."