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Workforce Education

Partnerships between businesses, educators and local leaders are providing skills training to fit employer needs

The Fast Start Partnership aims to help prepare individuals to meet the needs of regional employers

Traditional approaches to education are being reimagined as the demand for workers with skills that match the evolving workplace continues to go unmet.

Critics say that higher education is expensive and inefficient when it comes to arming workers with those skills. An alternative approach has businesses, educators, and local leaders working together to create programs that can provide the certifications and skills needed to become successful in an industry and career.

A good example of this is the Fast Start Partnership, a program created by Dow Chemical, Delta College, and Great Lakes Bay Michigan Works in Michigan which trains job seekers looking for entry level positions at Dow Chemical.

This partnership was founded to answer the question: how can we work with employers to help them find the skilled talent they’re looking for in a specific community?

Delta College offers this 13-week Dow training program and Great Lakes Bay Michigan Works handles the recruiting by matching job seekers to the employers hiring criteria. It also funds the majority of the people who go through the program through scholarships.

By helping prepare individuals so they can meet the needs of regional employers, the people behind this partnership are further setting up workers, their families, and their community for success.

Additional Videos is our signature digital series that shines the spotlight on the most innovative initiatives helping to train and re-skill Americans for the most in-demand jobs now and in the future.

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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.