As the city’s massive workforce development program rolls into active training, some industries are seeing much more interest than others.
The great majority of applicants are choosing career pathways in health care or as truckers. Thus far, few are choosing training for manufacturing, an industry that has in recent years struggled mightily to fill gaps in its workforce.
Manufacturers and program architects say outdated perceptions of the industry are to blame.
“People too often think of manufacturing as low-paying, dirty jobs, but that’s not the case anymore,” said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city office running SA Ready to Work. “These are high-tech, advanced positions that have career trajectories that pay very well.”
SA Ready to Work is the city’s $230 million program aiming to train thousands of low-wage workers for middle-class careers. City voters overwhelmingly approved a broad outline of the program and a sales tax to fund it in November 2020.
It has been and continues to be framed as both an anti-poverty program and an answer to many local industries’ needs for a more skilled workforce.
And while the program is still in its early stages, some industries appear on track to get more out of it than others.
Since enrollment opened in May, more than 7,500 applicants have signed up, according to the city’s dashboard. Of those, about 2,300 are being assessed for their eligibility, and just under 500 are already enrolled in various training programs. Applicants choose what career path they want to pursue.
Familiar jobs and industries
As of Nov. 1, only two applicants out of that nearly 500 have chosen training that would put them on the shop floor of a manufacturing plant. One has signed up to become a welder and another to become an industrial engineering technician.
Meanwhile, in health care, 61 have chosen medical assistant training and 41 have started the process to become registered nurses.
Truck driving is the second most common training track; thus far 73 applicants have signed up for training to become truck drivers.
Demand for medical professionals is high, and there is extreme demand for truck drivers.
According to the most recent labor report from SA Worx, the workforce development wing of Greater:SATX, local health care groups saw high turnover rates for all positions but especially in nursing. Replacing them has proven difficult. There were more than 1,500 job postings for nurses every month on average last year, according to the SA Worx report, but only roughly 500 hires per month.
Meanwhile, trucking positions see more hirings than postings, but demand is still astronomical — due in part to the high turnover rate in the job, which is as much as 90% annually for some companies.
Ramsey said these industries and jobs might also attract so many applicants because people are generally more familiar with them. “Everyone knows someone who works one of these jobs.”
Manufacturing needs remain
Like these industries, manufacturing too has workforce gaps. Around 60% of manufacturers in Texas in October were trying to hire or recall workers, and even more reported a lack of candidates, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank’s monthly survey. Roughly two-fifths of respondents defined the problem as a lack of technical competency among job applicants.
In part because of these specific technical requirements, manufacturers have an especially difficult time attracting new labor. San Antonio’s manufacturers made more than 100 postings per month on average for industrial engineering technologists last year but hired only 10 on average a month, according to SA Worx.
Some higher-ups at local manufacturing companies feel SA Ready to Work is unlikely to fill the hiring gap.
Take Knight Aerospace, which participates in SA Ready to Work’s monthly meetings with employers. Its director of accounting and human resources, JC Hernandez, said the company is in such a niche market — manufacturing add-on components for airplanes — that he expected few to get the specialized training they look for in potential employees.
“Ready to Work bridges a gap for many manufacturers, but I don’t know if that’s true for the higher-skilled market,” he said.
There also appears to be a lack of awareness about the program among some manufacturers. At the San Antonio Manufacturers Association monthly luncheon on Tuesday, few small-scale manufacturers the San Antonio Report spoke to were familiar with the program.
The same was true of leadership of some larger companies. Rod Spencer, plant director for Navistar San Antonio, which is one of the more than 150 companies participating in SA Ready to Work, said it was difficult to keep track of the various workforce development programs such as Texas FAME and Texas FAST (manufacturing training programs offered through Alamo Colleges, and which SA Ready to Work partners with).
“It’s all an alphabet soup,” he said. Spencer expressed a desire for a “one-stop shop” to help busy executives — which happens to be exactly what SA Ready to Work’s architects want the program to be.
Ramsey isn’t worried about the program’s visibility to executives. “Now that we’ve got people filling the pipelines, the awareness will increase at all levels of an organization,” he said.
As for the applicants, that’s a different story.
“A lot of work needs to be done to educate people about all the strong career pathways out there,” Ramsey said.
