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Workers with Joeris General Contractors install a mold for a concrete wall at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A worker at StandardAero at Port San Antonio disassembles a RB 211 jet engine from a Boeing 757. The company is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

Eboni Windom, a respiratory therapist at Texas Vista Medical Center, records the stats from the hallway of a COVID-19 patient. Texas Vista Medical Center is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program. Health Care is among the most popular fields among those who have applied for the program.

A forklift operator moves a mold for a concrete wall at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A worker tends to the production line at Mission Solar’s manufacturing facility on the South Side of San Antonio. The company is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A cybersecurity professional works in Accenture Federal Services’ cyber operations center in San Antonio. The company is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A worker builds a mold for a concrete wall at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

Caterpillar products line a lot at the Holt Cat headquarters in January 2018. The company is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

Plumbers work at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A plumber takes a measurement at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

Electricions lay insulated tubing at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A worker install a mold for a concrete wall at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

A worker install a waterproof layer to a concrete wall at the site of the new Spurs facility on July 28. Joeris General Contractors, the company doing the work, is among the roughly 180 employers that have pledged to look at hiring graduates from city’s new Ready to Work program.

Eric De La Rosa felt like he could do more. He had been working at a manufacturing plant for six years, and he found the job to be rote and repetitive. Also, he wanted to be his own boss.

So he left his old job in February with some savings and a dream of starting a trucking business someday. When he learned that he could pursue a commercial driver’s license for free through the city of San Antonio’s fledgling Ready to Work job training program, he questioned whether it was legit.

But by late June, De La Rosa was one of the first four San Antonians to graduate from the $200 million Ready to Work program after earning his CDL. He’s been interviewing with truck driving companies since, holding out for a job that pays well, he said.

His goal now is to save enough money to buy his own truck and trailer.

“At first, I didn’t believe it. Because the course I went through, they help you out, you don’t have to pay out of pocket for anything. They provide a uniform, food; they even help with bills if you need assistance, so that was really helpful,” said De La Rosa, who grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Southwest High School.

“I was amazed,” he said. “It was a four-week course, and I didn’t think I could do this in four weeks. But I did it.”

S.A. Works: ‘I have a career’: After bumpy roll-out, over 1,100 San Antonians working through Train for Jobs

City officials hope there will be thousands of such success stories from Ready to Work training programs. Over the next five years, the ambitious initiative aims to enroll about 28,000 city residents into college or job training and place 16,000 people into jobs that pay at least $15 an hour.

More than 4,200 people have applied for the program since it launched in mid-May. Ready to Work organizers expected 5,600 applications in the program’s entire first year.

“There’s a great need in our community. We’re not going to have a shortage of applicants,” said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city’s Workforce Development office, who was hired last August to oversee the launch of Ready to Work.

“It’s not some magical outreach strategy that we have,” he said. “It’s just that as people hear about it and hear there are no crazy strings attached to the program — that it’s genuinely a city trying to help people who need help — they’re pushing into the doors.”

Most training courses won’t begin until August and September because it takes 30 to 45 days after a person applies to work with a case manager and craft a personalized career and education plan. Applicants have so far expressed the most early interest in jobs such as nursing, truck driving and cybersecurity.

“There are some assessments they’re doing with the participant, coaching sessions with the participant to help them orient to the program,” Ramsey said. “We don’t want that to be a quick ‘Hey, sign up, tell me what you want to take’ and just brush them out the door.”

Ramsey, a 45-year-old native of Baton Rouge, La., is affable, and his booming laughter signals his presence. He delivers incisive soliloquies to whomever will listen about how San Antonio’s workforce development system can lift residents out of poverty en masse.

A Navy veteran and a former high school teacher in Florida, Ramsey said he’s endured tough times and that his experience motivated him to take on the challenge of rolling out perhaps the most ambitious taxpayer-funded workforce initiative a U.S. city has ever undertaken on its own.

“This was an opportunity to do something on a scale that will leave a permanent impact. That’s why I’m doing this,” he said. “People just need support. They need help.”

Jacob Castillo is excited, anxious and hopeful. After fighting drug addiction and spending two stints in rehab, the 39-year-old is building a new life through Ready to Work.

Castillo starts classes in phlebotomy — the medical practice of drawing blood — on Tuesday, one of the first cohorts of participants to enter training through Restore Education.

“A lot of stuff, I wasn’t proud of. It’s hard to be proud of clean times,” he said of sobriety. “But this is something concrete that’s going to get me somewhere.”

Castillo earned a master’s degree in philosophy in the mid-2000s, but fell into addiction and “bad living” over 10 years ago, he said. After working different jobs, a co-worker told him about the phlebotomy course and he applied.

Castillo hopes to land a position that will give him room to grow. Eventually, he said, he wants to buy a car, get some dental work done and have a child.

“I have hope that I will be able to get the resources that I need while getting the education to actually do something when I get out that’s worthwhile,” he said. “I had given up hope on trying to get into a more advanced position. But the time is here, and I’m doing it.”

Ready to Work’s early progress notwithstanding, Ramsey and other program organizers said they must prevent Ready to Work from becoming a bloated bureaucracy that’s unable to pivot or effectively place people into jobs.

To be eligible for training through Ready to Work, participants must be at least 18 years old, eligible to work in the United States and earn less than 250 percent of the federal poverty level, which is about $34,000 for an individual.

Program administrators have not determined how many of the 4,200 applicants are eligible, Ramsey said. The city is expecting a 70 percent eligibility rate among applicants.

The program will pay for participants to enroll in courses to earn industry-recognized skills certificates or pursue associates degrees. Ready to Work will also offer high school equivalency education.

The program will pay tuition for some residents to pursue bachelor’s degrees, but Ready to Work won’t fund a full four-year education. Participants must have earned 60 college credits to seek a bachelor’s degree through the program.

The city has contracted with four organizations to provide intake and case management services: Alamo Colleges District, Workforce Solutions Alamo, Project QUEST and Restore Education. They will receive a total of $189 million to pay for participants’ tuition and provide case management.

Another $2 million of sales tax revenue will go toward paying Restore Education and Alamo Colleges to provide high school equivalency courses, and $2 million more on a marketing and outreach contract with Creative Noggin.

The four main contractors will work with numerous subcontractors, and more than 50 organizations will provide training for hundreds of in-demand occupations that participants can choose from. The career catalog is 215 pages long.

“The sheer weight of coordinating a bureaucracy in a way that we keep everyone moving forward, that is going to be a challenge,” said David Zammiello, president and CEO of Project QUEST, which was De La Rosa’s case manager as he sought his CDL.

“If I have a concern, it’s that there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” Zammiello said. “We’ve got to be careful we don’t put too much weight on top of this and let agencies do their good work.”

Ready to Work administrators stand to benefit from lessons learned in the Train for Jobs program, which was essentially a precursor to Ready to Work and was funded with $55 million through the federal CARES Act.

In September 2020, the city opened enrollment in Train for Jobs, having launched it as a quick response to mass job losses wrought that year by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rollout of Train for Jobs in fall 2020 was marred by technical glitches for people trying to apply, and by the fact the city didn’t communicate enough with San Antonio employers to ensure graduates would be able to land jobs amid the pandemic.

But the program’s results have improved over time. Enrollment in Train for Jobs ended Dec. 31, although there were still nearly 1,400 participants enrolled in training through the program at the end of June, according to the city’s latest figures.

About 5,500 people enrolled in Train for Jobs, and 55 percent of graduates — 1,836 people — have gotten new jobs through the initiative. Just over 14 percent of people who enrolled in training dropped out before finishing.

Ramsey and other city officials say Train for Jobs was developed on the fly as the pandemic reshaped the labor market. The program was crafted by three city staffers before Ramsey arrived last year to establish the new workforce department, which now has a staff of 11.

Train for Jobs marked the first time that workforce development organizations spread throughout the city came together under a unified program. That’s laid the foundation for Ready to Work, said Sammi Morrill, associate vice chancellor for economy and workforce development at Alamo Colleges District.

“It gave us a baseline to figure out better practices going into SA Ready to Work,” she said. “It also showed us occupations people were interested in.”

Career pathways that have been popular among Train for Jobs participants — such as health care and information technology — are also popular among applicants in Ready to Work. Meanwhile, 65 percent of applicants in Ready to Work are women, and 62 percent are Hispanic. By comparison, 69 percent of people in Train for Jobs were women, and 65 percent were Hispanic.

“Women of color are still predominately pushing into the program,” Ramsey said.

Job placement is a much bigger focus in Ready to Work than it was in its predecessor program.

But since training providers can’t compel an employer to hire anyone, it’s more art than science. The main Ready to Work contractors have teams of staffers that communicate with employers about skills they need workers to have and about trainees in the program pipeline.

Around 180 employers in San Antonio signed a pledge saying they’ll look to hire program graduates.

“The employers we work with … will follow through and hire folks,” said Adrian Lopez, CEO of Workforce Solutions Alamo. “One thing we’ve got to be open to is the quality of the education and training folks are receiving. We’ve got to be open to where there are problems and issues. We need to fix that.”

On ExpressNews.com: Applications for San Antonio’s Ready to Work job training top expectations in first six weeks

Even as he suggested that the size of Ready to Work could become unwieldy, Zammiello of Project QUEST said he’s confident each contractor will be able to handle its portion of applicants. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions about Ready to Work too soon.

“I still worry that people are going to have this expectation like, ‘What’s happened six months from now?’ The real results will start to yield themselves a year and half from now, because it just takes people time to go through” training, Zammiello said. “When I hear elected officials talk, there’s a lack of understanding of what it really takes to take someone through a training experience, and the return on investment takes a little bit of time.”

By the time Ready to Work sunsets in 2027, several program organizers said they hope there’s enough momentum and philanthropic dollars behind the program to keep it running.

“You hear so many times: ‘These types of programs don’t work. People don’t want to work. There are too many needs that people have to get through a high-quality training program,’” Ramsey said.

Nevertheless, he said it’s appropriate “to be unreasonable” regarding the program’s aspirations for how well it reaches out to and serves people.

“We’re not going to set the bar low,” he said. “I keep saying that, but I mean it in my core. We’re going to change the narrative about the economic disparity that exists in this city.”

Diego Mendoza-Moyers is a business reporter covering energy, manufacturing and labor. A native of El Paso, he has previously written for the Albany Times Union, Las Vegas Review-Journal and Arizona Republic. He graduated from Arizona State University with a B.A. in journalism. Call Diego at 210-250-3165 or email diego.mendoza-moyers@express-news.net