New city unemployment program – TechSF

San Francisco’s unemployment rate is hovering slightly above 8 percent, similar to that shown in national unemployment statistics. In an effort to lower the jobless rate, Mayor Ed Lee recently launched TechSF.

Funded by a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, TechSF is a city program intended to put more city residents back to work. It will provide educational tools to unemployed and under-skilled San Francisco residents so that they can learn to work in the city’s growing IT and technology industries.

The program will also help nearly 1,400 AT&T and IBM workers take new educational courses so that they can become more competitive in their current jobs. Once TechSF workers complete its program, it is expected that they will be qualified for jobs paying anywhere from $25–50 per hour.

“Ensuring San Francisco residents have the skills and training they need to work in our City’s growing number of high tech jobs is a cornerstone of our economic strategies and critical to making sure our economic recovery reaches every neighborhood of our City,” Mayor Lee stated in a press release. “This major grant from the Department of Labor for our TechSF initiative will bring city residents, technology companies and our workforce training partners together to train and re-skill our residents to ‘win the future’ for San Francisco, in the words of President Obama.”