WAUKEGAN — Mid-afternoon sunlight streamed through glass walls onto a boisterous crowd on hand recently for a commencement ceremony in the College of Lake County’s auditorium.
It marked the end of one phase of training for the day’s roughly two dozen graduates of the college’s clean energy workforce hub and was the type of day backers of the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, or CEJA, had long envisioned.
As the event unfolded in late February, graduates took turns at the lectern sharing their stories of pride and hope.
“I really wish my father was here today to see me,” said one graduate while fighting through tears in front of a standing-room-only audience of fellow graduates and their families.
While many graduates extolled their monthlong training as life changing, data shows that the CEJA workforce model is struggling to funnel graduates into jobs in the clean energy sector.
“The hardest part about Friday was to see all those people there, and the tears were because they knew it was over; they go back to the life they had before,” said Yvette Ewing, executive director at The Community Works, a nonprofit that helps recruit candidates for the CEJA hubs. “The hardest part, I'll be honest, is knowing that there's no job at the end specific to clean energy.”
Of the 805 students who have graduated from CEJA workforce hubs, only 124 had found employment in the renewable energy sector or adjacent industry as of March 2026, according to figures supplied to Capitol News Illinois by the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, a rate of roughly 15%.
DCEO Assistant Deputy Director of Communications Eliza Glezer defended the hub network as a long-term investment still in its implementation phase.
“Current job placement figures reflect a program that is still ramping up,” Glezer said in an email to Capitol News Illinois. “The Department (of Commerce and Economic Opportunity) looks forward to seeing the program’s continued growth and success as the hubs further establish themselves in offering clean energy training, job placement services, barrier reduction support and more.”
Glezer said that the Equitable Energy Future Grant Program and the Community Solar Energy Sovereignty Grant — state programs that provide capital investments for renewable energy projects — are expected to create new opportunities for CEJA hub graduates.
Gov. JB Pritzker’s office declined to comment further, saying the DCEO statement was the administration’s official response.
Climate and Equitable Jobs Act
CEJA is Illinois’ 2021 landmark climate law that seeks to achieve 100% renewable energy in the state by 2050. Part of the law aims to incorporate people from communities that have “historically faced economic barriers and environmental damage” into the clean energy workforce. This includes jobs in renewable energy manufacturing, installation and storage; electric vehicle technology, and other ancillary services in the clean energy space.
“Waukegan represents exactly what we are trying to do with CEJA,” said Hannah Flath, director of communications for the Illinois Environmental Council, a lobbying organization that backed CEJA, “which is supporting communities that have long been burdened by industrial pollution, fossil fuel pollution and ensuring we are bringing workers along with us in this transition.”
In an interview with Capitol News Illinois, Sen. Adriane Johnson, D-Buffalo Grove, who attended the graduation and represents Waukegan, highlighted health disparities from environmental toxins that disproportionately affect Waukegan.
A 2018 case study from the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group, concluded that toxic coal ash from the Waukegan powerplant led to premature deaths and elevated asthma risk in the surrounding population. The plant was decommissioned in 2022.
Throughout the ceremony, the shuttered and aging coal plant loomed visibly along the lakeshore, a symbol that was not lost on anyone in the fifth-floor auditorium.
Waukegan, Johnson said, “has been dumped on for many years. And for far too long residents in Waukegan have been overlooked and not considered and dismissed.”
The state allocates nearly $23 million annually for the CEJA workforce hub network, which comprises 14 hubs around the state to provide training for entry-level jobs in the clean energy sector. Despite CEJA’s 2021 enactment, grants for the hubs were not awarded until mid-2024, with programming beginning later that year, according to the DCEO.
To make the training more feasible for students, each receives a $13 hourly stipend while in the classroom, along with assistance with child care, transportation and housing, as needed.
“It represented hope, and my heart was overflowing,” Johnson said of the ceremony. “Just a proud moment to see the legislation being implemented as we had envisioned.”
Post-program jobs
Most of the graduates at the Waukegan ceremony were finishing the so-called bridge program, a 120-hour curriculum that includes basic employability skills, workplace safety training, basic construction and electrical training. Data provided by the College of Lake County showed that 63% of its 268 enrollments since the start of its CEJA-related programming in early 2025 were for the bridge program.
“As far as what they learned in that four-week bridge program, it's not anything to really make you employable,” said Ewing, who attended the graduation in Waukegan and spoke to CNI later. “Some of them will have a fire ignited in them … but you don't change 40 years of behavior in 30 days.”
Some students who complete the bridge program at the Waukegan hub go on to longer advanced certification courses that focus on skills for energy efficiency auditing, heating and air conditioning, and electric vehicle technology, among others.
CEJA expressly targets formerly incarcerated people and those with other barriers to employment for workforce training. Proponents argue these equity provisions are needed to foster a fair energy transition, but Ewing said the backgrounds of many graduates continue to plague them as they try to break into the industry.
The College of Lake County, which received $3.5 million in state funds for its Waukegan hub in 2024, deferred questions regarding the employment rates of hub graduates to the DCEO.
Ewing said her nonprofit is seeking more state funding to provide job services to CEJA students after graduation, especially those with high barriers to employment like violent criminal histories, homelessness or substance abuse issues.
Linda Larsen, associate director for research at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Climate Jobs Institute, attributed the 15% employment number mostly to the novelty of the program, but said there is “much room for improvement.” Larsen added that in her own research, she has interviewed CEJA graduates who now earn prevailing wages in the sector.
“I fully expect outcomes to improve with time and coordinated effort,” Larsen said. “Outcomes will improve as the CEJA workforce program works not in isolation, but as part of the larger clean energy ecosystem in Illinois.”
Federal headwinds
Due to cuts to clean energy tax credits stemming from Congress’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year, Illinois clean energy businesses face more uncertainty in a growing but already volatile industry, Larsen said.
A 2025 research paper from Larsen’s institute concluded the act had already resulted in layoffs and slowed hiring in Illinois’ clean energy sector and would likely result in more as tax credits expire. In the report, clean energy employers and others familiar with the industry said recent graduates of CEJA workforce training were particularly vulnerable as a result of the federal rollback.
Larsen added, however, that action at the state level is helping offset the federal cuts, potentially softening the blow to the sector in the coming few years.
“Illinois stands out in its robust incentive programs, and it has even increased some of that funding and support in response to the rollbacks,” she said.
A September 2025 report by E2, a nonpartisan environmental and economic policy group, ranked Illinois fifth nationally in terms of the total number of clean energy jobs with just more than 130,000. But when measured in terms of its growth rate, it fell to 34th.
In its statement to CNI, the DCEO pointed to tariffs imposed by the federal government as driving an increase of construction costs, in turn delaying projects and limiting hiring.
“The (CEJA hub) program must navigate establishing new employer pipelines and aligning industry needs as the federal government rolls back clean energy incentives,” Glezer, the DCEO spokesperson, said.
While the clean energy job market may be shakier without a steady stream of federal assistance, students in Waukegan trying to get their foot in the sector’s door were unequivocal in their support for the program. Among those attending was Will Gist, one of the first students to complete Waukegan’s bridge program early last year, who was invited by the college to speak at the graduation ceremony.
“It gives you options. I didn’t think I had many,” Gist said of the hub programming. He is now set to be the first student to complete the hub’s yearlong electric vehicle technology curriculum.
“It'll give you a career if you do the work and stick to it.”
Reece Dower is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.