4/19/2024 - Notes on Conversation with Ken Nim of the SF Office of Economic and Workforce Development

I had a good call with Ken Nim of the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development this week. We discussed ways that our DAO can best serve the job training providers and the candidates they serve.

I asked if there were any providers that would be good candidates to bring by our next DAO meeting. He said that they are mostly understaffed and it would be hard for them to make time to come to the meeting without a very clear value proposition to them.

I emphasized that we want to help connect them to job ready candidates and also to new sources of funding. He said they have no shortage of job seekers and emphasized a point he made in his presentation to our lunch a few weeks ago, which was that they could barely keep their own websites up to date and didn’t think they would make any time to manage their GEO pages unless there was a clear way that it would lead to more funding for them.

I asked him what else they need help with and he said they all need help building relationships with employers and finding more placement opportunities for people who complete their training programs.

This has me thinking that the Employer Development role we identified is one we should look at hiring for. If we could find and fund a full time person to do that outreach on behalf of the training providers, it could go a long way to helping us build relationships with them.