When Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago received a call earlier this year asking if he would support a new jobs initiative from JPMorgan Chase, he replied with his typical bluntness.
“I said, ‘Of course, but I’m not looking for more work,’ ” Mr. Emanuel said in a phone interview. “I need resources.”
On Thursday, Mr. Emanuel and Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, plan to announce “New Skills at Work,” a five-year, $250 million initiative focused on filling the skills gaps in some of the largest United States and European job markets, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London.
The plan comes at a time when JPMorgan is facing unprecedented fines and regulatory scrutiny. It recently reached a $13 billion settlement over its questionable mortgage practices in the run-up to the financial crisis and is under investigation for its hiring practices in China.
Announcing a new philanthropy initiative after suffering a reputational blow is not uncommon on Wall Street. In 2009, Goldman Sachs announced its largest single charitable contribution, a $500 million small-business assistance program, after facing harsh criticism about how much it paid its executives in the wake of a government bailout.
Mr. Dimon dismissed a connection between the bank’s recent troubles and its jobs initiative.
“JPMorgan Chase, for 100 years, for 200 years, has always tried to be a great community citizen,” Mr. Dimon said.
In Chicago, Mr. Emanuel has already been dealing with a problem that has affected the whole country: Employers are struggling to find workers who meet their specific needs. The mayor started College to Careers, a program that pairs local schools with employers to better train students for the labor market. Mr. Emanuel even recalled receiving an email from Mr. Dimon, who hailed the program as a smart idea when it began in 2011.
That program would eventually serve as a model for “New Skills at Work,” according to Peter Scher, the head of JPMorgan’s corporate responsibility unit.
JPMorgan Chase plans to commit $50 million annually, beginning in 2014, to research and training programs across the country and in Europe. Like College to Careers, it also plans to arrange meetings between groups that train people for jobs and the employers who need specific skills. The bank has already teamed up with a number of organizations, including Year Up and the Aspen Institute’s Forum for Community Solutions, a national work force training group.
It plans to announce specific grants and partnerships early next year.
Mr. Dimon will be chairman of the bank’s Global Workforce Advisory Council, which will advise on the new initiative, and Melody C. Barnes, the former director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, will serve as co-chairwoman. Mr. Emanuel will have a “key role” in how the initiative unfolds in Chicago, one of the first cities the program will target, although his official position within the effort is not yet clear.
The initiative will include a heavy research component, drawing on the bank’s internal market data as well as data from outside analytics firms.
The program is part of the bank’s larger push to focus its charitable giving on areas that have more to do with its own businesses. In 2014, the first year of the program, it plans to donate $225 million, a figure that will likely include some cuts to the bank giving for the arts and culture. Last year, JPMorgan donated $183 million in total charitable giving.
“The biggest need of all is to grow the economy and grow the jobs,” Mr. Dimon said.
While 7 percent of the American labor force was unemployed as of November, employers are taking longer to fill open jobs.
“Usually when we have a slack labor market, employers fill their openings fairly quickly,” said Steven J. Davis, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “That’s not happening now.”
The average job vacancy so far this year has been 22.4 days, Mr. Davis said, compared with 20 days between 2004 and 2006, when the economy was stronger.
Mark Williams, a 22-year-old graduate of Year Up, said he could not find work and lived with his mother when he enrolled in the organization’s information technology program last year. He found a job in server management at a New Jersey hospital before graduation and now lives on his own in the Bronx.
“My whole goal was to make something better of myself,” Mr. Williams said. “It made me believe that I could do anything.”