The City of San Antonio’s ambitious, taxpayer-funded workforce development program will spend up to $32.5 million to expand its network of partners in an effort to move more low-income residents into well-paying jobs.
The University of Texas at San Antonio, Goodwill, Hallmark University and Galen College of Nursing are the types of partners with the capacity to respond to the request for proposals, said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city’s Workforce Development Office, which oversees Ready to Work.
Each could easily identify which of their students or clients would qualify for Ready to Work, Ramsey said, and they already have existing relationships with local employers, which is key to fulfilling the program’s ultimate goal: getting people hired.
Approved by voters in 2020, Ready to Work seeks to place historically disadvantaged residents into high demand jobs that pay at least $15 an hour by paying for training, a certificate or a degree, along with support services to help reduce barriers to completion.
Through 2025, the program is expected to collect almost $240 million in taxes. In 2022, the city signed contracts with four providers worth up to $183 million.
Through those providers — Project Quest, Alamo Colleges District, Workforce Solutions Alamo and ReStore Education — the program has spent about $52,000 so far. They have successfully placed at least 1,552 people into jobs. Another 9,173 are enrolled in training, certificate or degree programs.
Those figures fall short of the program’s goals, which were revised down from helping “up to 40,000 people,” during the campaign to get voters’ support. By the time council approved the four contracts in early 2022, the goals were to “intake” up to 39,000 applicants, enroll up to 28,000 in training or degree programs, and ultimately place 15,600 in jobs.
In May 2023, Ramsey told then-City Councilman Clayton Perry he expected Ready to Work to have placed 2,000 people into jobs by the end of fiscal year 2024, which ended in September. The program has also fallen short of its goal of placing at least 80% of graduates into jobs within six months.
Now, said Ramsey, “we’ve got the basics figured out and we’re ready to expand, to pick up the volume.”
Ready to Work is poised to launch a robust marketing campaign in 2025 to bring more people in the door, he said, and so must have the capacity to help additional residents.
The program’s four existing contractors are not working at full capacity, Ramsey told the San Antonio Report the day before his Wednesday briefing to City Council on the plan to add contractors.
“I think they’re operating at about the pace that they’re going to operate at,” he said. “We need another partner or two to come alongside and help in those efforts.”
This contract would be for entities that do in-house training and are willing to take on the additional pieces of the program, Ramsey said: the career counseling, the wraparound support services and the requirement to place graduates into jobs.
Growing the pipeline
Ready to Work has expanded in an effort to reach more residents in several ways since its launch. In March, it launched a pair of programs to subsidize local employers for on-the-job training. In May, it inked a deal with Joint Base San Antonio to help train veterans and their dependents, a move that grew out of the decision to expand eligibility to military-connected residents in Bexar County.
In 2023, Ready to Work announced that it would expand apprenticeships and “pre-apprenticeships” with the support of a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. Later that year, it offered to pay the costs of six-week internships for graduates, as a low-risk way for employers to take a chance on more nontraditional workers.
The RFP would go out later this month, with a timeline that assumes the new contracts would go into effect in June 2025. The existing contracts with the current four partners start expiring in April. Those contracts could be extended in one-year increments for three years, adjusted or simply ended.
“We’re continuing to evaluate [those contracts] as we get closer to the end of the three years,” he said.
City Council was generally agreeable to expanding the group of partners administering Ready to Work, especially with those that have a track record of successfully moving graduates into jobs.
Council discussion after Ramsey’s presentation got slightly sidetracked after several council members asked whether Ready to Work could be expanded to include teenagers.
City Manager Erik Walsh said the Ready to Work advisory board would be the first place to have that conversation, but he noted that the program was developed targeting adults.
There may be other opportunities to assist local youth, said Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “Voters were very clear in what they expected from this program,” he said.
