Phil Weinberg on removing the college degree requirement is a win-win

A new campaign encourages employers to hire those Skilled Through Alternative Routes
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STARs are people who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes. A new campaign – Tear the Paper Ceiling – spearheaded by Opportunity@Work and the Ad Council encourages companies to overlook the requirement for a college degree and consider this capable talent pool.

Phil Weinberg, president and CEO at STRIVE, says eliminating the requirement for a four-degree is a win-win in the war for talent.

He explains, “There are so many men and women who are talented and motivated and often don’t have access to the social capital, the networks, the pathways to accomplish their career objectives.”

“What we do at STRIVE is we partner with communities to identify what are those engines of economic growth. We end up partnering in parts of the economy where there are great opportunities to build a middle wage, middle class career – health care logistics, construction, where there is a great demand for skills, but not always the need to have the educational degrees and credentials.”

Weinberg continues, “We identify those talented individuals. We partner with employers and we help to build the training pathway to ensure that we’re connecting our most talented assets in our communities to those economic opportunities.”

Learn more about The Paper Ceiling.
Learn more about Opportunity@Work.
Learn more about the Ad Council.
Learn more about STRIVE.

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.