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Indianapolis: Growing talent, growing the middle class

The Map to the Middle examines pathways to good jobs and careers in Indianapolis
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The way we work has changed dramatically over the past decades due to evolutions in technology, increasing globalization, and, now, a health pandemic that has led to an unemployment crisis. These factors have thrown roadblocks into the road to the middle class for many Americans.

What does the middle class look like today? How do we create new pathways to good jobs and careers? Where do jobseekers find the help they need to gain the skills that employers are looking for now in an employee?

These are questions being asked all over the country. Looking for answers, WorkingNation turns its attention first to Indianapolis.

Like many midwestern towns and cities, Indiana’s capital city of nearly 850,000 has long relied on manufacturing to fuel the economy and provide good-paying jobs for its workforce. Those traditional manufacturing jobs have been disappearing, being replaced by jobs requiring new kinds of skills.

In this new WorkingNation special, Map to the Middle: Indianapolis, broadcast in Indianapolis on CBS4, WorkingNation talks with local and state leaders, business leaders, and educators about how they are working together to ensure that the city’s residents – young and old – jobseekers can find their own pathway to the middle class.

‘Map to the Middle: Indianapolis’ explores Indy’s changing workforce

INDIANAPOLIS – The workforce has changed considerably in recent years-and that’s had an impact on Indianapolis and its middle class. CBS4 and WorkingNation explore how the Circle City went from a manufacturing town to the city it has become in our special, “Map to the Middle: Indianapolis.”

Learn More About the Workforce Opportunities Featured in The Map to the Middle

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.