The New York Times reported on Mike Hutchins, 58, a laid-off automotive engineer who is seeking more job retraining. Photo by Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times.

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Community colleges are being thrust to the front lines of a large-scale overhaul of the American workforce, the success of which is urgent, crucial and still in doubt.

As part of their efforts to re-skill workers of all ages for jobs that are expected to be in high demand as the economy recovers, the local colleges are increasingly retraining aging baby boomers choosing encore careers that give back of their talent and experience.

That makes the more than 1,000 community colleges around the country connectors not only of younger and older and community and business, but of human abilities to the work that needs to be done.

>>Read about new community college encore career programs here and here.

President Obama recognized this unique role this week in calling for $12 billion to help 5 million more people complete community college programs by 2020. Some of those will gain two-year degrees, while others will receive certificates for programs, generally lasting six months to a year, that provide credentials for specific, high-need jobs.

“This is training to become a medical technician, or a health IT worker, or a lab specialist, or a nurse,” Obama said at a community college in Warren, Mich. “In fact, 59 percent of all new nurses come from community colleges. This is training to install solar panels and build those wind turbines and develop a smarter electricity grid. And this is the kind of education that more and more Americans are using to improve their skills and broaden their horizons.”

Obama acknowledged that job training was not a “silver bullet.”

The New York Times last week reported on a Labor Department study earlier this year that found the benefits of the biggest federal job training program to be “small or nonexistent” for laid-off workers, with little difference in results between those people who had been retrained and those who had not.

The Times highlighted fundamental difficulties in predicting where future job growth will occur, how hard it is to deliver effective career-transition services and, frankly, how tough it is for older workers, particularly those who have spent their working lives in a single industry, to make the jump to a new field.

Some educational reformers advocate broadening the focus of retraining efforts from merely providing “crisis-intervention” at the time of layoffs to supporting “working learners” who are continuously in a process of upgrading their skills for the economy’s new demands.

A new report from the Center for American Progress argues for more attention to coaching and certification for specific career paths and more coordinated, high-quality and continuous career-development programs for those in all stages of their careers.