New cannabis jobs board in New York seeks to help legal weed industry staff up

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After over a year of work, the New York State Cannabis Workforce Initiative has launched a jobs board to help employers in the state’s legal weed industry staff up and assist job-seekers.

CWI launched the beta version of its jobs board, CannaJobsLink, in mid-July, and will be optimizing it over the next few months, said David Serrano, CWI’s project manager. But CannaJobsLink is already operational, and is garnering excitement among marijuana industry employers, he said.

“We’re 10 for 10 – every employer that we’ve shown the system to has signed up to our programming,” Serrano said. “It’s really great to see that there are jobs available in the market, and employers are coming in very excited to hire a workforce.”

CWI is a partly state-funded collaborative effort of the nonprofit Workforce Development Institute and Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations. The organization has trained hundreds of people on the basics of the cannabis industry since 2022, including through its traveling two-day Seed-to-Success Statewide Live Workshop.

CWI’s job board aggregates cannabis industry job postings in New York State from sites like KayaPush, Indeed and others, Serrano said. Right now there are about 80 postings on the site, and Serrano expects there will be between 300 and 400 active job postings at any given time when the CannaJobsLink site is fully launched.

An important aspect of CannaJobsLink, Serrano said, is it’s free and doesn’t require users to create an account. The lack of gatekeeping will allow anyone who’s interested in a job in New York cannabis to use the board as a tool, he said.

“We definitely try to make it as efficient as possible,” said Serrano, who added that the job postings from the board are already being sent to students in their databases, as well as people who have signed up for CWI’s programming.

Additionally, CWI is working with employers on the job listings they’re posting, Serrano said.

“It’s more than just sharing a job opportunity – which is critical – but it’s also making sure that the employer feels supported through the process – that they have resources for how to hire,” Serrano said.

CWI is using a two-pronged approach to cannabis education with expertise from Cornell and the Workforce Development Institute. WDI is creating training focused on industry education, while Cornell is providing information about worker rights and employers’ legal responsibilities.

Since the initiative launched in late 2021, its work has been funded by a $250,000 budget allocation from New York’s state legislature to Cornell, along with an appropriation last year of $2.5 million.

“Our partnership with employers is also a training partnership,” Serrano said. “In addition to helping them find workers, we are giving them training and resources to not only hire those workers effectively and lawfully, but also to be a good employer for the longevity of their operation.”

Disclosure: The Cannabis Workforce Initiative is a sponsor of NY Cannabis Insider events.