Every week, ‘Good News of the Week’ features a curation of positive headlines from San Diego, delivered straight to your inbox. A blend of aggregated stories from San Diego’s most trusted news sources and original EDC-created content, GNOTW provides a comprehensive recap of the region’s best stories from the past week. GNOTW is sponsored by Manpower.
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For the week of February 21, 2025, here’s what we’re reading:
Apply to join MetroConnect VIII export accelerator
Know an export-ready business that could benefit from growing its international presence? WTCSD’s MetroConnect export accelerator is back for its eighth cohort, offering up to $30,000 in grants, executive workshops, and mentorship from multinational leaders. Deadline to apply and expand your export sales is June 30.
To celebrate and inspire the efforts of regional employers, EDC’s Inclusive Growth blog series highlights San Diego companies helping to drive progress on the 2030 Inclusive Growth goals.
Launched in 2018 and informed by a partnership with the Brookings Institution, the Inclusive Growth initiative sets 2030 goals for San Diego related to increasing: 1) the supply of talent, 2) quality small business jobs, and 3) newly thriving households. The goals inform San Diego’s economic priorities and make the business case for economic inclusion.
Small businesses are the backbone of the economy
San Diego small businesses represent 98 percent of all firms and account for 59 percent of total employment, outpacing the national average. In 2023, San Diego County ranked third for most new business formations in California. Despite significant contributions, small businesses struggle to keep up in an increasingly expensive market.
With a goal to add 50,000 new quality jobs in small businesses by the end of the decade, EDC data shows a surge in progress after years of steady recovery. In 2023, the region added 48,481 new quality* small business jobs, nearly surpassing the goal.
While the significant rise in quality jobs is reassuring, small businesses still struggle to compete. Employer-led efforts to support small businesses and increase the number of quality jobs are critical to the future of the region’s economy, and Cultura is among the local companies contributing to the progress.
How Cultura is moving the needle
Cultura is a San Diego small business specialized in a broad range of furniture solutions tailored to fit the needs of its clients. Since 2009, Cultura has partnered with more than 1,250 companies to build spaces that support their businesses, people, and ultimately culture. Whether it’s designing inviting lobbies, creating flexible workspaces, or setting up collaborative meeting rooms, Cultura excels at transforming environments that foster both productivity and well-being.
As a diverse, women-led company, Cultura plays a critical role in the region’s economic ecosystem. By providing tailored solutions for office environments, Cultura directly supports the infrastructure needs of San Diego companies while also adding to the region’s number quality jobs. Cultura also prioritizes small, local businesses in its internal vendor selection process, further strengthening the local economy.
When local firms choose to work with local vendors, they are not only fulfilling their needs but also investing back into the regional economy. This practice helps keep procurement dollars circulating locally, promoting quality jobs and fostering a more resilient local economy. In fact, EDC has found that if local anchors shifted just one percent of existing spend to local, small, or diverse suppliers, San Diego would see millions of dollars in economic impact and thousands of jobs.
The synergy between large anchor institutions, smaller businesses, and local vendors like Cultura creates a powerful multiplier effect that fuels job growth, drives innovation, and sustains a thriving economy.
Cultura’s mission to create the best work environments begins internally. Offering flexibility in the work schedule, competitive salaries, matching retirement contributions, annual bonuses, and a unique work environment, the company demonstrates how small businesses can contribute to Inclusive Growth progress.
Join the movement
Progress on EDC’s 2030 Inclusive Growth goals is only achievable with and through the region’s employers who must be committed to scaling innovative and intentional solutions in San Diego. Companies like Cultura are helping to collectively pave the way toward a more inclusive regional economy. Join us:
Endorse the goals, and be part of the change San Diego’s economy demands.
*A quality small business job is defined as one provided by a company with fewer than 100 employees and that pays at least $23 per hour and provides healthcare benefits.
Originally authored by Taylor Dunne in Voice of San Diego’s ‘A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools’
Every parent wants to see their child pursue a career that makes them happy, and it is a bonus when they can feel confident that that career will also set them up for financial success.
In San Diego, one of the most dynamic economies in the world, there is abundant opportunity for high-impact careers and upward mobility—sometimes you just need to see it to believe it.
In my role as the director of talent initiatives for San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC), I have devoted my career to improving the pathways from local education programs into high-wage, high-demand jobs across San Diego County. Here are some common questions I get asked about these efforts in our region.
Q: What is Career Technical Education?
According to the state of California’s Department of Education, Career Technical Education (CTE) is “a program of study that involves a multi-year sequence of courses that integrates core academic knowledge with technical and occupational knowledge to provide students with a pathway to post-secondary education and careers.” Here in San Diego County, the board of education’s first goal speaks to CTE as a priority, stating that the public education system should aim to “connect the educational experience to the world of work, to guarantee all students graduate prepared for college, career, and beyond.”
CTE courses can fall into one of 15 industry categories, identified by the California State Board of Education. The courses can be standalone, or part of a multi-year series. Some of them also count toward A-G requirements, which must be completed for admission into a California public university.
Q: When should I start thinking about career pathways for my child?
CTE opportunities at school are a great time for students to begin thinking about prospective career paths. K-12 schools across the region offer these courses, and some have gone the extra mile to really set students up for success.
For example, the Chula Vista Elementary School District offers Innovation Stations where students learn about careers in life sciences, health, technology, and more. A portion of this experience includes local tech giant Qualcomm, which brings to life what the students are learning in the classroom.
Helix High School offers a biotechnology pathway that stacks courses for grades nine through 12. Kearny High Education Complex runs four small, unique schools, each focused on a critical industry, embedding CTE in students’ learning throughout their four years. These kinds of curriculum, coupled with internships, school clubs, and other opportunities, can offer students the chance to begin exploring what careers are available to them in San Diego and how they might begin preparing for those careers today.
In fact, employers agree that experience indicating a proven interest, like school clubs, extracurricular activities, and elected courses like those available through CTE pathways, rise above other qualifications in roles like computing and engineering. Candidates with less formal training that can articulate how they have independently pursued opportunities are more appealing than those who are fully trained but disinterested.
On the other hand, these opportunities can also help young people weed out the careers they do not want during these formative years, before they invest time and money into further training.
Q: What are the jobs of tomorrow?
Looking ahead, future jobs are technical in nature, and they’re in industries like technology (especially with the rapid development of artificial intelligence), healthcare, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing. We also anticipate alternative energy will continue to climb that list. Increasingly, these jobs require some sort of post-secondary training.
Everything from trade schools to four-year degrees and beyond become critical for preparing students to take on those roles into the future. In fact, over 100,000 more jobs require a post-secondary degree today as compared to just eight years ago. Luckily, they are also some of the highest paying in our region. We see growth in jobs that pay salaries of upwards to $149,000 per year.
So, what does that mean for San Diego’s future talent and local companies?
It means that community college, trade school, and university classrooms need to be accessible to all San Diego students regardless of economic status or family history. This economic growth, combined with a declining population, means that companies cannot continue to rely on traditional recruitment patterns like sourcing from elite universities, and instead must consider additional channels.
Working age population vs. jobs over 10 years:
In fact, to keep pace with the economy, the San Diego region will need to double the number of people receiving a post-secondary education by 2030.
Q: What tools and resources are available?
EDC is excited to have been able to help bring a new distinction to this year’s version of Voice of San Diego’s A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools. You can look for the labor market score for schools offering Career and Technical Education programs. Additionally, parents can explore local learning opportunities in relevant fields at the San Diego STEM Ecosystem’s web directory, which includes a filter for cost-free options.
Finally, our organization offers resources that can help parents connect with the local economy and industry-vetted training programs:
Explore EDC’s Talent Dashboard where you can access more real-time local data, like what is shared above, to help with understanding the future of jobs in San Diego.
Check out Advancing San Diego’s Verified Programs. These are post-secondary training programs across the region that have been vetted by local companies for teaching the skills needed for the jobs of tomorrow while also reaching and serving a diverse student population. In receiving this status, Verified Programs open opportunities for students to access paid internships and other critical work-based learning experiences.
Learn more and get involved in EDC’s Talent Initiatives. Contact our team today:
Every week, ‘Good News of the Week’ features a curation of positive headlines from San Diego, delivered straight to your inbox. A blend of aggregated stories from San Diego’s most trusted news sources and original EDC-created content, GNOTW provides a comprehensive recap of the region’s best stories from the past week. GNOTW is sponsored by Manpower.
Get Good News of the Week in your inbox every Friday.→ Sign up
For the week of February 14, 2025, here’s what we’re reading:
As tariff threats loom and the country teeters on the brink of an all-out trade war, we all wonder what it means for our binational region, the future of the popular USMCA, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs tied to global commerce in San Diego. This will be a volatile period for the North American supply chains that enable this region to compete globally. What we have learned is that in the midst of uncertainty, we should return to what we know to be true about this binational region.
Navigating trade uncertainty in a binational region
As tariff threats loom and the country teeters on the brink of an all-out trade war, we all wonder what it means for our binational region, the future of the popular USMCA, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs tied to global commerce in San Diego.
This will be a volatile period for the North American supply chains that enable this region to compete globally. We have been here before.
In all the economic development work we do in this region, we strive to do it binationally, as a metropolitan region of close to seven million bisected by an international border. We travel together on investment attraction missions to South Korea or Singapore; we advocate together in Washington, D.C. and Mexico City for better infrastructure; and we work every day with counterparts in Tijuana to help companies create deep and resilient binational supply chains in critical industries.
What we have learned is that in the midst of uncertainty, we should return to what we know to be true about this binational region:
We know that our border economy, anchored by the busiest port of entry in the Western Hemisphere, has been a tremendous driver of economic growth, job creation, and competitiveness—not just for San Diego, but for America as a whole.
We know that what we do here is not trade, it is co-production: a single component—in an automobile or a medical device—may cross the border six to eight times, with value added at each stop, before finally reaching its customer. This means that 40 percent of what we import from Mexico was made by American workers in the first place. For imports from China by contrast, that number is less than four percent.
We know that this ability to regionally produce goods is a compelling reason why foreign companies invest here, and why local companies can compete globally and export their goods and technologies around the world, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in this region alone.
And we also know how critical these supply chains—in aerospace, electronics, semiconductors, and medical devices—are to the broader U.S. economy. Notably, 60 percent of all medical devices imported to treat patients in hospitals in Boston and Atlanta are produced in this region and cross this border every day.
Finally, we know how important long-term investments in infrastructure—like Otay Mesa East or the Cross Border Xpress terminal—are to enhancing the remarkable economic engine we have created in this region.
Here in San Diego we have been finding solutions for decades, by working collaboratively to build border infrastructure, to facilitate trade and immigration, to fight crime and enhance education, and to create better outcomes for businesses, for consumers, and for communities.
The coming weeks and months will be bumpy—as barriers to trade and market access rise around the world—and they will be especially difficult for the 98 percent of U.S. exporters that are small businesses. Yet despite this turbulence, the overall calculus for American policy makers and global business leaders has been consistent for well over a decade: Regionalize supply chains closer to the customers they serve, and rebuild U.S. manufacturing capabilities in industries critical to national security and competitiveness. And there is no way to achieve those goals without relying on our North American neighbors. Even in the most extreme tariff scenarios, trade with Mexico and Canada would likely increase, but businesses and consumers would pay higher prices for the pleasure.
Our job in this moment is to be agile and creative in helping firms of every size—who have played by the rules and made significant investments in this country and its neighbors—to navigate uncertainty, continue to reach their customers and suppliers, and maintain jobs and supply chains in our most critical industries.
Every week, ‘Good News of the Week’ features a curation of positive headlines from San Diego, delivered straight to your inbox. A blend of aggregated stories from San Diego’s most trusted news sources and original EDC-created content, GNOTW provides a comprehensive recap of the region’s best stories from the past week. GNOTW is sponsored by Manpower.
Get Good News of the Week in your inbox every Friday.→ Sign up
For the week of February 7, 2025, here’s what we’re reading:
Inclusive Growth Spotlight: San Diego County Regional Airport Authority
To celebrate and inspire the efforts of regional employers, EDC published a spotlight on the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority and its efforts to support local small business jobs—one of three pillars of the 2030 Inclusive Growth goals.
With the rest of our region’s business community, we’re closely watching updates around the new tariff on China and the paused tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
EDC’s Chief Strategy Officer Nikia Clarke shares in a formal statement: “We know that this will be a volatile period for the North American supply chains that enable this region to compete globally. We have been here before. Here in San Diego, from medical devices to semiconductors and consumer goods, our supply chains are so integrated that 40 percent of what we import from Mexico was made by American workers in the first place. Our job in this moment is to be agile and creative in helping firms of every size—who have played by the rules and made significant investments in this country and its neighbors—to navigate uncertainty, continue to reach their customers and suppliers, and maintain jobs and supply chains in our most critical industries.”
EDC and World Trade Center San Diego remain a resource and partner to our regional business community, offering free assistance, information, and guidance.
Need support? Contact our team.
EDC and WTCSD work directly with companies—free of charge—to help them grow in San Diego.
Every week, ‘Good News of the Week’ features a curation of positive headlines from San Diego, delivered straight to your inbox. A blend of aggregated stories from San Diego’s most trusted news sources and original EDC-created content, GNOTW provides a comprehensive recap of the region’s best stories from the past week. GNOTW is sponsored by Manpower.
Get Good News of the Week in your inbox every Friday.→ Sign up
For the week of January 31, 2025, here’s what we’re reading:
Do you know a local student looking for an opportunity in San Diego’s fast-growing economy? EDC is now offering two competitive part-time internships providing students with valuable experiences in economic development, research, and talent programs.
To celebrate and inspire the efforts of regional employers, EDC’s new Inclusive Growth blog series will highlight San Diego companies helping to drive progress on the 2030 Inclusive Growth goals.
Launched in 2018 and informed by a partnership with the Brookings Institution, the Inclusive Growth initiative sets 2030 goals for San Diego related to increasing: 1) the supply of talent, 2) quality small business jobs, and 3) newly thriving households. The goals inform San Diego’s economic priorities and make the business case for economic inclusion.
Small businesses are the backbone of the economy
San Diego small businesses represent 98 percent of all firms and account for 59 percent of total employment, more than the national average. The impact that small business owners have on local jobs cannot be overstated, and yet, they struggle to keep up in an increasingly expensive market.
With a goal to add 50,000 new quality jobs in small businesses by the end of the decade, EDC data shows a surge in progress after years of steady recovery. In 2023, the region added 48,481 new quality* small business jobs, nearly surpassing the goal.
While the significant rise in quality jobs is reassuring, small businesses still struggle to compete. Employer-led efforts to support small businesses are critical to the future of the region’s economy, and the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority is among those contributing to the progress.
How SAN supports the ecosystem
As a regional anchor institution that generates more than $12 billion dollars in economic activity each year, the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority is a pillar of the economy. This fall will mark the completion of the first phase of the much-anticipated Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport. The project will continue to generate economic opportunity for San Diego, primarily through jobs and contracting opportunities—key components of Inclusive Growth.
Learning to do business with the Airport can be difficult to navigate for small, local businesses. The Airport Authority’s Small Business Development (SBD) Program is the primary business unit responsible for opening the doors to smaller businesses so that they can compete for airport contracts.
The Airport Authority’s Procurement Department also maintains an outreach plan and tracks supplier diversity metrics for all solicitations. In collaboration with department contract owners, Procurement develops solicitations and facilitates the review, evaluation, selection, and onboarding of respondents. To engage local, small, and Veteran-owned businesses, the Airport Authority implements a variety of outreach strategies designed to ensure these businesses are informed of contracting opportunities and can be competitive when bidding on Airport projects.
Both SBD and Procurement, in partnership with all Airport Authority departments, encourage diversity in the Airport’s suppliers, professional services, contractors, and concessionaires.
The Airport Authority’s annual “Meet the Primes” event is open to the public and connects small businesses directly with prime contractors, airport staff, and other government agencies to learn how to navigate the contracting process. In addition, the Authority hosts various training and educational events throughout the year, covering how to work with the Airport and become certified for contracting opportunities.
“We also try to see if there are opportunities to unbundle projects to make certain aspects of the project smaller, so more businesses have the ability to compete,” said Craig Ruiz, Manager of the Airport Authority’s SBD Program. “We do targeted outreach to businesses in those different categories to ensure they are prepared to bid.”
On a project-specific level, the Procurement team proactively identifies businesses that can meet the needs of each project, ensuring all relevant vendors are informed and engaged through targeted outreach. The Procurement Department leverages platforms like PlanetBids, an e-procurement tool where businesses can register, access contracting opportunities, and connect with prime contractors for subcontracting opportunities, helping to broaden their reach and increase their chances of success. Small businesses are invited to signup for PlanetBids to access trainings and more information.
“Supplier diversity provides a greater range of solutions to projects, and helps our community flourish,” said Airport Authority Director of Procurement Jana Vargas. “Investing in these businesses creates a ripple effect that allows them to reinvest in their communities, creating a cycle of opportunities.”
The Airport Authority’s efforts continue to show results. For 2023, there was a 21 percent year-over-year growth in major construction project spending to Local Business Certified (LBC) firms, with more than $32 million awarded to LBCs.
Businesses in the Small Business Enterprise (SBE) category were awarded contracts representing almost $28 million in 2023. The federally funded Quieter Home Program awarded $1.4 million to Small Business Enterprises (SBE).
Join the movement
Progress on EDC’s 2030 Inclusive Growth goals is only achievable with and through the region’s employers who must be committed to scaling innovative and intentional solutions in San Diego. Anchors like San Diego County Regional Airport Authority are helping to collectively pave the way toward a more inclusive regional economy.
Endorse the goals, and be part of the change San Diego’s economy demands
*A quality small business job is defined as one provided by a company with fewer than 100 employees and that pays at least $23 per hour and provides healthcare benefits.
To learn more and get involved in EDC’s work, contact:
Every week, ‘Good News of the Week’ features a curation of positive headlines from San Diego, delivered straight to your inbox. A blend of aggregated stories from San Diego’s most trusted news sources and original EDC-created content, GNOTW provides a comprehensive recap of the region’s best stories from the past week. GNOTW is sponsored by Manpower.
Get Good News of the Week in your inbox every Friday.→ Sign up
For the week of January 24, 2025, here’s what we’re reading:
The map is not the terrain, says EDC’s Sr. Director of Research and Economic Development Eduardo Velasquez in his 2025 Crystal Ball writeup. In the year ahead, EDC will keep its eye on how capital converts to job growth, how AI will boost productivity, and how mortgage rates will impact home sales—among other wildcards.
