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- Good morning everybody.
I have the pleasure of talking to you today
about one of the ways that we're innovative,
which is how we engage with our community through research.
And it's one of the things
that really sets us apart
from many of the other workforce boards across the country.
So, we're gonna talk today a little bit about
our most recent work looking at
San Diego's priority sectors,
which Mark teed me up for perfectly
and really finding those bright spots
where not only are there lots of jobs,
but where are the jobs that are growing
and have living wage salaries.
So, we start this process by looking at the jobs,
and finding out what are those priorities,
and to do that, we look at three things:
are those jobs going to be available,
are they going quickly,
and are they going to be profitable for people.
And for that, we're looking at the entry-level wage,
the tenth percentile.
Are you making at least $16 dollars an hour at that point?
And then we looked at all of these jobs
that are high priorities
and have high potential for people in San Diego to get into,
and threw them across all of the sectors
to find out where they happen the most,
and that's where we got to our priority sectors,
and when you look, you see energy construction, utilities.
Our priority sectors all have at least
10,000 priority jobs in them,
and so across just these 72 occupations,
in the next five years,
we're looking at nearly 25,000 annual openings.
That's a lot of jobs to fill.
And so yay, we know what these are.
But you'll see that things like
retail and the service sector don't show up here,
even though they have a high number of jobs.
We've been fortunate to work with the Walmart Foundation
and the Aspen Institute to do a good deal
of work in that sector as well.
And it's a separate strategy,
it's a separate line of work that we dig into as well.
But, while we can take this information
and inform our programs and our strategies,
it's a huge missed opportunity
if the only people who hear about these
are the people who walk through the doors
of our career centers.
So how do we get these out into the world?
Well, in our first round of priority sector research,
with our community college partners,
we created these posters to go into classrooms,
to go into career centers, our community partners,
to bring these sectors alive for people
to get them right in front of their faces
so they know what opportunities are out there.
And we saw that there's a hunger
for this information in our community
and there's thousands of them across San Diego now.
So when we did a refresh of the
priority sector research this year,
we went to these people to say,
"Well, what was valuable to you about these posters?
"What is the information,
"what else would you like to see
"and how do you use them?"
And we took the lead from them in designing
what you are about to see,
which is our brand new priority sector posters.
That's the cue guys, come on over.
(audience laughs)
So,
you can see that they've got a new look,
a new design and some really crucial information
that, again, we took the lead from our partners on.
And I will zero you in on it,
it's not just these posters.
There is these two page companion sheets as well
that have a little bit more data.
So it's really a scaffolded experience.
So, if you see these bottom sections here,
it gives sample occupations
that tie into the RIASEC framework,
and it's a way for individuals,
whether they be students or job seekers,
to understand who they are
and how they might connect with the world of work.
So they can quickly go to these posters
and see in each different sector where they might fit.
If you are a social person,
so you like to help people, for example,
yeah, there's gonna be a lot of teachers
and education and human development,
but there's something for you in all of these sectors,
so it helps people to connect.
What do I want do with,
who do I want to do it for?
And if they can make this connection,
this is an example from one of our educational partners
in Cajon Valley.
We know that they're gonna be
more successful in their careers.
It's not just Cajon Valley,
we have partners in Chula Vista
who are working with the RIASEC in their classrooms.
We have partners up in Vista
who are starting to incorporate this.
And we want it to be a language
that we're all speaking across the county
to help connect people with the world of work
and their own interests.
And you can see, it's gonna be another tool
that they can use in the classroom
when they're looking at things like Charlotte's Web,
and trying to connect what those characters are
and where they fit in the world.
So, next step on this is to
the third step in this experience,
not just the posters, the companion sheets,
but we're also developing an online experience
to help them to learn even more about these sectors
and to guide them to other tools that we have.
We have the San Diego Career Coach.
If you go to WorkForce.org/CareerCoach,
you can see data on any occupation
that's for our local region.
You can see the training providers
and the educational institutions
that are training for that occupation.
There's a wealth of knowledge,
and we're just thinking of ever new ways
to connect people with that information.
If you are interested or need to download these posters
or get them printed out,
you can go to our website at WorkForce.org/Posters,
and the companion sheets are there as well.
And you can always email us, research@workforce.org
if you have questions about the information
or other things that you'd like to see.
So thanks very much for your time today.
(audience applause) Thank you all.
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