WASHINGTON – As businesses announce massive layoffs and companies impose hiring freezes, work force developers and job trainers are playing one of the most important roles in their careers, Gov. Angus King of Maine said Friday.

As a guest speaker to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, King told the audience of government employees that they had to prepare for the waves of people who will lose jobs in the coming years and train them for new careers, especially if the economic downturn continues. He calls them “stranded workers” – people who are being phased out of the work force as machines take over manual labor.

“This is the great public policy issue,” King said. “The future is only going to accelerate the dynamism of the economy. If we’re not there to catch people and help through the transition, then we’re sunk.”

The group of work-force agency employees was in Washington this week for a winter policy meeting on various legislative issues. State government work-force agencies help people find jobs and provide training programs. Moving people off the welfare rolls and into jobs has been a major role of work-force development agencies.

Maine, which reported an unemployment rate of 2.5 percent in January, one of the lowest in the state’s history, has been recognized for getting residents off the welfare rolls. Training and Development Corp.-Community Investment Partnership, based in Bangor, was one of 18 welfare-to-work initiatives recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor last year for developing innovative ways to help the hardest-to-employ welfare recipients find jobs.

A major challenge for the new work force is that newly created jobs require a higher level of training. And the price tag on that type of preparation is high, according to King. He urged the group to partner with universities, adult education schools and technical institutes to overcome the expense and provide a higher level of training.

“We have to be rethinking the way we deliver these services and be creative,” he said. “If we don’t adapt, we’re not going to survive.”