DEPARTMENT: Economic Development
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Rene Dominguez
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: City-wide
SUBJECT:
Workforce Development Briefing
SUMMARY:
Staff and SA Works will provide a briefing the workforce development focus of the Economic Development Department for FY 2018. The presentation will highlight the partnerships underway to help meet industry need in filling open jobs that are difficult to fill and providing access to a career pathway for all residents through outcome alignment across multiple partners. The briefing will also include information on pilot projects and a forecast of focus areas for FY 2019.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The Council-adopted SA Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan estimates that an additional one million people, 500,000 households and 500,000 jobs will be added to San Antonio by 2040. Planning for this growth includes a focus on jobs and economic competitiveness. Workforce development has come to the forefront as one of the most important strategies to serve the dual purposes of growing the economy by providing a workforce that businesses need to grow and providing opportunities for meaningful career pathways and earning potential to the residents of San Antonio.
The current workforce system faces multiple challenges. One issue outlined in the SA2020 Talent Pipeline report is that San Antonio businesses are struggling to fill middle skills jobs. Middle skills jobs are those jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree. This skills shortage highlights the fact that though the unemployment rate is low, a challenge in San Antonio is the educational and skills attainment required to equip people to successfully earn meaningful employment in high demand occupations to sustain and grow the current and future economy. Additionally, the systems meant to work on these issues are continuously having to balance multiple stakeholders, funding streams, and reporting structures as barriers to executing resident-focused collaboration and alignment.
In an effort to address these challenges effectively, and based on the current resources allocated to the Economic Development Department, the City of San Antonio supports SA Works, a combined initiative of the City, Bexar County, and HEB that is housed in the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. SA Works is guided by an industry council of business leaders that focus on identifying the workforce needs of business and identifying education and training providers that can prepare people to attain the education and skills required to fill the jobs business is demanding. By committing to providing this important feedback loop to the community, SA Works has agreed to provide the middle skill job targets that will drive alignment between business, education, and workforce development providers seeking funding from the City of San Antonio.
Once SA Works has identified in-demand middle-skills and occupations, the goal is to align the workforce delegate agencies towards those occupations by connecting the delegate agencies through a pilot technology solution called Viridis. Viridis will integrate with each agency and assist participants and agencies to progress from one agency to the next until they can obtain a middle skill job. This pilot will also provide data to effectively determine the return on investment of City funds and where City investment needs to be targeted to ensure residents are moving through the system to fill open jobs.
Staff will also discuss Pay for Performance as a tool to be evaluated during FY 2017. Pay for performance is a means to secure funding from impact investors to pay for innovative pilots that would be reimbursed by government and other investors based on pre-determined outcomes.
The Economic Development Department will lay out a high-level two year plan and will seek Council direction on the one year implementation with annual two year plan reviews presented to EWDC going forward.
RECOMMENDATION:
This is a staff briefing and no action is required.