Coal miner Wade Coots is unresponsive, lying flat on his back. Fellow miner Lou Mills hurries to his side, quickly crouches beside him and listens for a heartbeat, then methodically runs his gloved hands down Coots' face, torso, arms, and legs to check for injuries.

In a mine emergency, the assessment Mills is performing can help determine how critically a miner is injured and what treatment should be administered to save his life. But this time, it is only practice.

Mills, Coots, and three other miners who work for the James River Coal Company are getting hands-on Mine Emergency Technician (MET) training at the Perry County JobSight workforce center, operated by the L.K.L.P. Community Action Council. The JobSight-located at Jeff just south of Hazard on KY 15-also hosts a mine electrician's course twice weekly. Thanks to a collaborative effort involving James River, JobSight, and Hazard Community and Technical College (HCTC), both courses are also offered to miners on-site at James River's Blue Diamond Coal mine at Leatherwood in rural Perry County.

At the end of the MET assessment exercise, Mills received praise from instructor Cecil Howard and prepared to switch roles with Coots.

"The action makes this work," Mills said. "It's easier to learn how to do this right by actually doing it, rather than just talking among ourselves about it."

Both the MET and mine electrician classes upgrade the skills of working miners, preparing them to pass a state test and earn a certification. Each miner who completes one of the training classes and passes its certification test will receive a bonus.

The classes-both on-site and off-site-are the most recent example of the ways JobSight is assisting eastern Kentucky's leading industry, according to Jack Duff, manager of the Perry County JobSight.

"Coal will continue to be eastern Kentucky's top industry for the foreseeable future," Duff said, "so it's very important that JobSight continues to help the industry and help the people who make their livelihoods in it succeed."

The 12 miners participating in the MET training will log a total of 56 hours of work at either the JobSight or the Blue Diamond Coal training facility, according to Howard, an MET and electrician who teaches the classes at both locations on behalf of HCTC. The 14 miners in the electrician class will log 96 hours of training, he said.

The MET class centers around hands-on training and exercises like those Coots and Mills performed, Howard said. After their injury-assessment drills, the pair practiced CPR techniques on a dummy, and took turns strapping each other onto the back stabilizer used to immobilize a miner when a spinal injury is suspected.

The mine electrician class primarily involves lectures, study, and "book work," although having it on-site at the Blue Diamond mine adds a hands-on component, said Danny Sorrells, human resources director for Blue Diamond Coal and Leeco.

"If there's an electrical problem a miner doesn't understand, he can actually go out and get to an electrical panel, and the instructor can show him what he's talking about," Sorrells said.

Sorrells said offering the classes both at the JobSight workforce center and on-site at the mine-in addition to their traditional location at local community colleges-could help boost enrollment in future classes and raise the company's success rates on the certification tests.

"The JobSight is just a good place and good environment for us to do this in," he added, "and with the classes we're having at the mine, they can come right off the job and go straight into training, or go from the training right into their shift."

"A lot of older miners might go down to a college and be somewhat intimidated around younger students," Sorrells said. "When these guys have to go to these classes straight off a shift with their work clothes still on, that can be a big deal.

At JobSight workforce centers, employers, employees and job seekers can benefit from a welcoming atmosphere and more than a dozen state and federal employment and training programs and employer services in a single location. The JobSight network is administered in 23 eastern Kentucky counties by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, Inc. (EKCEP), a federally funded non-profit agency based in Hazard.

James River Coal has successfully used several of the employer services provided by JobSight and its parent organization EKCEP, including EKCEP's Employer-Specific Orientation and Screening (ESOS), On-the-Job Training (OJT), and JobFit on-line job-profiling system, which helps the company identify and hire workers who have the best attitude, aptitude, and abilities to become productive miners in the company's Perry County operations.

The Perry County JobSight has also hosted weekend safety training sessions for James River Coal, including an Oct. 7 session that brought in more than 65 employees and mine electricians for an eight-hour "refresher" course, Sorrells said.

"They go over new state and federal mine safety laws, and talk about any accidents or violations that might have occurred at their mines so we can try to keep our incidents down," Sorrells said.

"We like having these at the JobSight because it's close to our mines here. The staff there already has VCRs, DVD players, laptops and projectors set up, so it keeps me from having to carry everything all over the place. It's just very convenient for us," Sorrells said.

"This is a good example of the workforce system coming together with other partners to meet an employer's needs," said Crawford Blakeman, EKCEP's Business Solutions manager. "We're here to help business do business. If we can help bring convenience to an employer that helps it meet its training goals, then we're doing our job."

That kind of convenience is available to any area employers who would like JobSight to help with similar events or front-end human resources tasks, Duff said.

"We're glad to help out James River Coal, or any other employer," Duff said. "We pride ourselves on working well with both sides of the workforce equation-employers and job seekers."