WIP-Amanda-Cage

A skilled workforce, good jobs, and investing in equitable outcomes

A conversation with Amanda Cage, National Fund for Workforce Solutions
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In this episode of Work in Progress, my guest is Amanda Cage, the president and CEO of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

The nonprofit is a national network of innovators and implementers in workforce development, says Cage, with a shared goal of collaborating with workers, employers, and communities to advance a skilled workforce, promote good jobs, and invest in equitable outcomes.

The National Fund and its partners co-create opportunities and solutions that allow workers to thrive. “This includes training, upskilling, and workforce learning (such as apprenticeship), but also other interventions that promote worker engagement, satisfaction, and well-being.”

Cage explains, “Essentially, these communities have come together and on some level have agreed to our four integrated solutions framework, where we focus on activating employers to make jobs better, equipping workers for success, changing systems, and co-investment.”

Practically speaking, these collaboratives are built around industry partnerships in which employers work together to solve some of the problems that they were collectively having, usually around talent recruitment or retention.

Cage says, “We have industry partnerships in manufacturing, in construction, healthcare, IT, and a number of other industries. And when we started working with employers in those industry partnerships, we realized there are some common elements around job quality and making sure that workers had access to what we consider to be a quality job.”

“As part of that, we created a framework of what that quality job looks like, a definition. So we work with employers now to really think about their internal jobs, how those jobs are designed and how we can make them a quality job through a variety of elements.”

According to the nonprofit, they “catalyze investments in a competitive workforce where people are empowered to learn, train, grow, advance, and achieve their potential.”

Listen to the podcast here, or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Read the transcript for this episode of Work in Progress here.

Episode 177: Amanda Cage, president & CEO, National Fund for Workforce Solutions
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.