Upskilling King County, Wash., Workers on a ‘Pathway to Good Quality Jobs’

Brown: Digital fluency can be critical to career success. A lack of digital skills can serve as a barrier to entering the workforce, advancing in your career, and transitioning into a new field. Hello, I'm Dara Brown, and this is "Getting Connected", powered by Comcast Newsmakers. We're on location at the Net Inclusion 2024 conference in Philadelphia. Joining me is Marisol Tapia Hopper. She's the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Funding for the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County. Marisol, thank you so much for being here.

Tapia Hopper: Thank you, Dara. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Brown: Your organization has a unique way of bridging the digital divide. Can you tell me about that?

Tapia Hopper: Yeah. So the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County is one of the 12 local workforce boards in Washington State. And when the pandemic hit, one of the first things that we heard is that the digital divide is one of the main barriers that people are experiencing in the community. So hearing that, we took on the responsibility to develop several strategies to address it. And we have partnered with Comcast to bring digital navigators to American job centers. We launched a Digital Navigator pilot program where we partnered with 12 community-based organizations. We also launched the Digital Equity Asset Map tool. We also launched the Digital Needs Assessment tool. And we're continuing to address kind of ways in how we can continue to address it, but also do this in partnership with other organizations that are doing similar work.

Brown: When your community members get their basic digital skills, how do you get them into the Workforce Development Program?

Tapia Hopper: In partnership with community-based organizations. So the WDC is not a direct service provider, but we do this in work with communities that -- community organizations that are rooted in the community that have expertise in this work, and doing so in partnership with job seekers and workers. And part of their work is to make sure that when someone comes into their doors, it's really assessing what are their needs, but also making sure that they have access to the trainings they need, the funding that they need, so that they can get those skills and make sure that they're in a good pathway for, you know, their own upskilling, but also pathway to good quality jobs.

Brown: And how are the digital navigators working with the workforce program?

Tapia Hopper: They play a crucial role, because part of their work is really how do we get someone who may have very little, you know, computer skills, or doesn't know how to use a computer, ready and comfortable using those tools and getting them into a pathway where they can actually, you know, get better jobs for themselves, get the tools and the skills that they need so that they can actually be ready when, you know, automation potentially may hit their jobs and their jobs may disappear. So, really making sure that we're doing this work from the perspective of people who are the farthest from opportunity, and that means that we have to support individuals who have the longest or the farthest, you know, barriers to digital equity.

Brown: How has this work impacted the community?

Tapia Hopper: Absolutely. You know, when we launched the Digital Needs Assessment tool, that was a tool that did not exist in our region. Nobody was mapping, you know, who was providing a free computer or who was providing in-language digital skills training. So we took on the responsibility to kind of do this asset mapping from that community perspective and really identify the organizations that were doing that work. And from that work, we identified over 40 organizations that were doing that work and now our community partners, you know, frontline staff have access to a map that allows them to make referrals and connect people in a way that was not available before.

Brown: Marisol Tapia Hopper, thank you so much for your time today.

Tapia Hopper: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Brown: And thanks to you as well for watching. For more conversations about digital equity and broadband expansion, visit GettingConnected.com. I'm Dara Brown. ♪♪ ♪♪