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Q&A
New York City Learn platform and mentorship programs for underrepresented employees
0:27:10
·
4 min
Council Member de la Rosa inquires about the New York City Learn platform and mentorship programs for underrepresented employees. DCAS representatives explain the platform's benefits and discuss challenges in implementing mentorship programs across agencies.
- The NYC Learn platform provides easy access to various training opportunities for city employees.
- Only 17% of agencies reported offering mentorship or training programs for underrepresented employees.
- DCAS organizes training expos and encourages agencies to share best practices for mentorship and development programs.
Carmen de la Rosa
0:27:10
Great.
0:27:11
I also want to recognize that we've been joined by council member Menon.
0:27:15
Yep.
0:27:15
Okay so in 2024, DCAS launched New York City Learn, a training platform for New York City employees.
0:27:24
How is the platform being used to promote equitable access to training and upskilling opportunities for underrepresented employees?
0:27:32
Thank
Kadian Outar
0:27:36
you.
0:27:37
We are very excited about the NYC D Learn platform because what it does it provides access to great access to individuals with training.
0:27:46
So right now the city employees can just go on, you know, nyc.gov/learn and see all of the different trainings that are available and register for them, you know, depending on what their interests are.
0:27:58
For the cultural awareness trainings, those are free, so that process is a little bit easier and they're able to, you know, immediately go into those trainings, and so we are consistently promoting all of the different trainings with not only our agency personnel officers or EO officers, but our training liaisons and directly to the employees that we engage to make sure that they are aware of the access that they now have with the system.
Carmen de la Rosa
0:28:21
Great.
0:28:22
According to data reported by the mayoral executive order '45 of 2019, which requires New York City agencies and offices to publicly report five metrics of the city's equity related work.
0:28:36
Only 17% of agencies reported offering mentorship or training programs to support career advancement for underrepresented employees.
0:28:45
What barriers prevent a wider adoption of this initiative and how can agencies be incentivized to implement them?
0:28:51
And the second question, second part of that question is what role does d cast play in ensuring that agencies adopt these programs as a standard practice?
Katrina Porter
0:29:06
So what I can say is that as it relates to training councilmember de la Rosa, you know that it's at the agency level, so agencies have to have a budget to send their employees to training.
0:29:19
And so what we do at DKAS is that we're we're always working to highlight free trainings at our agency personal officer meetings and you know just making it the information available for agencies to know what's available for their employees.
0:29:36
As it relates to to mayoral executive order 45, I can get back to you with an answer on that.
0:29:43
You know I can't provide any additional information.
0:29:45
Okay
Carmen de la Rosa
0:29:46
I wonder if there is an opportunity to sort of cross reference agencies that may have trouble retaining underrepresented groups?
0:30:00
Is there sort of a cross reference that DCAS can do in order to say hey we're noticing this pattern in an agency, this is something you can benefit from?
0:30:09
Does that level of communication with the city agencies occur?
Kadian Outar
0:30:13
So I also wanted to add to what Katrina said in terms of the training and to respond to the question about the mentorship programs.
0:30:22
As you know, different agencies have different levels and different budgets to be able to provide different types of mentorships.
0:30:28
What we do in terms of the engagement and the support that we provide to the agencies, we try to figure out agencies that are doing really great things as a best practice and take that and have them present to at one of our APO meetings or our EO officers meetings so agencies can see, you know, a real life in action of how something like this can happen within their agency.
0:30:49
For learning and development, we know that there sometimes is a restriction in terms of the budget, so what we have done and what we did last year is we did a training expo where we offered about 70 something free training for employees across the city, so we had about 1,300 individuals that participated in those trainings, and so it's a way for agencies and employees to know that this is available for them and to build that interest, and we do and work with agencies who are able to have their own.
0:31:19
They may take an emotional intelligence training and want to give it directly to their agency, so we see a lot of that happening right now, so maybe they don't have a formal mentorship program, but they do take other initiatives to make sure that their folks get trained.