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Bilger CNBC Op-Ed: Creating a career path for underserved communities

States are working with local businesses to support apprenticeships.
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As automation and AI technologies continue to reshape the make-up of the workforce, more and more current workers and job seekers are going back to school or going online to get the skills needed to get a good job.

For many, the cost of upskilling, earning a college degree, or gaining other quality credentials is out of their price range. Money doesn’t have to be a barrier. Many businesses are offering work, earn, and learn opportunities through apprenticeships.

At WorkingNation, we’ve profiled a number of states that are working with local businesses to provide these apprenticeship opportunities. Our Founder and CEO Art Bilger wrote about these states making a difference for the CNBC special report, America’s Top States for Business.

“Multi-tiered collaboration can lead to opportunities to level the academic and economic playing field for disenfranchised communities, arming them with the skills needed to attain economic security and enabling them to live a dignified life. There are several states already making connections with local business leaders to tackle this crucial issue, many through exposure to paid, career pathway learning opportunities.”

There are more than 7.3 million open jobs in this country, waiting to be filled. Apprenticeships can help fill them.

You can read the entire Op-Ed here.

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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.