Ready to Work has opened a new front in its $200 million workforce development effort by subsidizing on-the-job training for new employees and new skills training to boost the career prospects of those already employed.
The taxpayer-funded workforce development program will spend an initial $3.1 million on two pilot programs with the potential to train or upskill almost 1,400 workers across 33 local employers.
In a show of support for the new initiatives, representatives from more than a dozen of those businesses attended Tuesday’s briefing to the City Council’s Economic and Workforce Development Committee meeting. The committee voted to send the pilot programs to the full council, which will have the chance to approve them on April 11.
Subsidizing employers to do their own on-the-job training and skill-building has several upsides, said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city’s Workforce Development Office, which oversees Ready to Work: Employees earn while they learn, and local companies improve their business outcomes.
The on-the-job training program will allow companies to hire those who may have recently earned a certificate or degree but have no experience, defraying the cost of training them on the job. That’s also a boon to potential employees who can’t go without a paycheck while they complete job training.
The other program will subsidize the cost of training existing employees to do more skilled work, allowing them to progress up the ladder at their companies.
Together, these two work-based training programs “put the employer in the driver’s seat,” Ramsey said.
Employer-led training
Christian J. Guerra, president of Avanzar Interior Technologies, which builds car interiors for Toyota, said the incumbent worker training program will help the company save the jobs of its entire welding division. Toyota recently changed the design of its seat frames from metal to glass-filled plastic, Guerra said.
With subsidies from Ready to Work, as many as 100 people who used to weld will now get advanced training that will allow them to work on a more complex line, involving robotics and automation.
“Otherwise, we would have had to let them go,” Guerra said Tuesday.
For the incumbent worker training program, Ready to Work will reimburse employers up to $100,000, capped at no more than $5,000 per employee to teach them new and advanced skills. On-the-job training for new employees will reimburse employers up to $150,000, capped at $10,000 per employee. Those jobs must pay at least $18 an hour.
Twenty-four employers were chosen to participate in the on-the-job training pilot; each had to submit a training plan. Big employers include StandardAero, Toyotetsu, Avanzar and the Holt Group, parent company of Holt Cat. Those four companies alone have committed to hiring and training 524 people, assuming council approves the programs. Smaller companies will train between two and 15 employees, including George Plumbing, J&R Tile and South Texas Allergy & Asthma Medical Professionals.
A handful of companies will take advantage of both programs. Holt Group, for example, committed to upskilling 300 of its existing employees; Avanzar 100.
Travis Wiltshire, owner of CNG Engineering, said he wished the $5,000 cap for training existing employees was higher for companies like his, which need highly skilled, specialized engineers, but he said the program will still help his company train residents for jobs he has had to look elsewhere to fill in the past.
“A lot of times we can’t find the skilled workers we need here, so we have to go outside of San Antonio,” he said.
‘Natural phase 2’
City Manager Erik Walsh called the worker training programs “the natural phase 2” of Ready to Work, which has spent the past year and a half focused on getting residents into the program. Ready to Work offers tuition assistance and wrap-around services for residents to earn certificates and degrees that will prepare them for what the program calls “quality jobs” — defined as paying at least $15 an hour plus benefits, in one of the targeted occupations the program has identified as having the highest need and potential for career growth.
Ready to Work has been criticized for not filling up the training pipeline quickly enough and not engaging with employers. Most recently, it has struggled to quickly move those who earn certificates into jobs. Just 44% of those who complete a program are hired within six months. Many graduates face multiple barriers seeking work, from a lack of child care to involvement in the justice system to a lack of work experience. Subsidizing on-the-job training reduces employers’ risk while also supplying a paycheck to the resident.
The Ready to Work dashboard, which is updated daily, shows 6,450 people currently enrolled in training programs who will be seeking jobs when they are complete, so it will be critical for the program to do so swiftly.
Ramsey rejects the notion that employers haven’t been involved with the program, noting that more than 400 have “pledged their commitment to Ready to Work.”
But he acknowledged that Ready to Work needs to do a better job of moving people quickly into jobs. He said the program staff is always iterating to solve challenges as they arise. The career coaches who work with participants are now trying to do more work on the front end, making sure they understand what opportunities are available. These coaches are also now better connected to the human resource departments of pledged employers.
Of the main partners in Ready to Work — Workforce Solutions Alamo, the Alamo Colleges, ReStore and Education and Project Quest — the latter has the highest percentage of graduates moving into jobs, so “we want to leverage their best practices,” Ramsey said.
Ready to Work also launched a new “employer champion” recognition program, honoring University Health at an event last week that highlighted a dozen Ready to Work graduates the health system had hired, including three who were promoted after boosting their credentials.
Reilly Traurig and Claudia Becerra now work as registered nurses for the health system, promoted after earning their degrees.
Joel Bongwele was working as a University Health housekeeper. Through Project Quest, he earned a computer science certificate just as the health system was rolling out new software to schedule its housekeepers. They needed a supervisor who could manage the system and teach others. They promoted Bongwele, a move that nearly doubled his pay.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who likes to emphasize individual success stories along with the scale and ambition of the Ready to Work effort, welcomed the addition of the two new employee-led training programs.
They demonstrate, he said, “Ready to Work’s fundamental strengths, which are the flexibility and adaptability of the program to respond to the needs of the employers in our real-world economy.”
