Aldebol asks about training outreach and awareness of free courses
Aldebol asks whether DCAS tracks training requests and how workers learn courses are free; Outar describes outreach through agency personnel officers, training liaisons, dedicated NYC to Learn sessions, and flyers emphasizing no cost to employees.
Does DCAS have access to information about the number of workers who submit requests for trainings and the number of workers whose requests are granted?
We can get back to you on the number of folks that have requested trainings, but for the number of people that have participated in trainings for individual users, we've seen that number has been increasing across the last three years.
We started out with about 13,000 that were engaged in training, and with some of the promotions that we've been doing in the newer system, that number has risen up to over 20,000 employees that are participating in training.
And what's your outreach to workers so that they know that this is available to them?
At no cost, no out-of-pocket cost, right?
Because if I look at the website and I see $1,900, I'm likely to say, I can't afford that.
I'm not going to take her training class.
Yes, and that is something that the team is very aggressive about.
We have, and, you know, based on the survey, we have seen that folks are not familiar with the information that's there.
So, one, we reach out to the agency personnel officers.
We communicate with the training liaisons.
We have now developed a training session specifically for NYCD Learn where we're reaching out to all of our contacts at the agencies, all of the employees who have engaged with us in any kind of professional development training to let them know directly that we're having this session.
We walk them through what they can get at NYCD Learn, how they can go.
or through and apply, we also let them know that the courses are free.
We also include that information in when somebody go in to apply, we include that language that is at no cost to the employees.
And we also created a flyer that the agencies can share or place up with their employees.
So we noticed that as we were doing these sessions, a lot of employees were asking, you know, what's the fee to them?
And so we're consistently and constantly thinking about different ways that we can let them know that there's no cost to you, you should be engaged with this.
And we've seen that in the numbers of folks, more people that are registering for and taking the trainings.