Cheryl-Oldham-Talent-Forward

We need everybody off the bench

Upcoming U.S. Chamber of Commerce event to focus on strategies for closing the skills gap.
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Technology is changing how we do our jobs and its having an impact on businesses big and small. There are more than seven million open jobs around the country. You find them in every industry, from health care to advanced manufacturing and retail to cybersecurity. These very different sectors have a key component in common — employers are having a hard time finding skilled workers to fill those jobs.

Figuring out how to grow and recruit talent is important, not just for businesses, but also for future and current workers. “It’s one of our biggest challenges,” says Cheryl Oldham, Senior Vice President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Center for Education and Workforce, “and I think the employer community has an important role to play.”

This Thursday, the Chamber will bring together business leaders, nonprofits, educators, and policymakers for its ninth annual Talent Forward conference in Washington, D.C. The day-long event will focus on ways to get these different groups more in sync with one another to transform how we train students and workers.

Cheryl Oldham (Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce)

“We really are trying to take a holistic view of the talent marketplace, ensuring that individuals have the skills and competencies they need to fill the jobs that are available,” according to Oldham. “It’s so much bigger than just a skills gap. It’s a people issue.”

The number of open jobs is troublesome. Economic success depends on trained workers. She says it is time to get “everybody off the bench. We need anybody who can and wants to work to work. We need to be thinking about all populations and making sure we are doing everything we can to get them into the workforce.”

The kick-off session at Talent Forward will look at how to increase the skills and job opportunities for the formerly incarcerated. The featured speaker is singer, composer, and activist John Legend, founder of FREEAMERICA (@LetsfreeAmerica), a culture change campaign focused on ending mass incarceration.

He’ll explain the campaign’s Unlocked Futures accelerator program which provides entrepreneurs touched by the criminal justice system with a grant and tools to grow their businesses. “Unlocked Futures recognizes that entrepreneurship is a pathway for people who have been affected by the criminal justice system to earn a family-sustaining income and build a career,” according to the FREEAMERICA website.

“There’s that issue of how do we make sure that we’re thinking about everybody who wants to be in the job market and, and what are both policy and programmatic conversations that need to take place to get them connected to the workforce,” explains Oldham.

She also believes more needs to be done to get older workers upskilled to fill some of these open jobs that are being created by changing technology. Here, employer leadership is key. “There are certainly examples of employers that are leading in this area. AT&T always comes to mind. So we’re asking at the conference, ‘how do we make sure that we address this?’ We know jobs are changing, and are changing fast, so we have to provide opportunities for our employees to upskill, and to be reskilled, and support them doing that.”

A session in the afternoon — Maximizing In-House Talent: Upskilling That Works — will focus on sharing best practices in that area.

Helping businesses address their workforce needs in an effective way is one of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s goals. More than five years ago, the Chamber created the Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) initiative. “It started with a white paper and an idea, and then it became a pilot project, and then it became a curriculum and an academy to teach the strategies and approach,” explains Oldham.

It’s now in 29 states with thousands of employers plugged into it. “TPM is all about providing the strategies and tools to the employer community. That means, in part, being able to communicate clearly and with specificity your competency and credential requirements. What is it you’re looking at? What are the skills that you’re looking for?”

Carolyn Cawley (Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce)

Carolyn Cawley, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, will be looking at the next steps for TPM and how it will be changing with the changes in the workforce needs.

There are many other issues on the agenda, including a look at What to Do When Robots Do Everything: 21 (More) Jobs of the Future, something every employer and employee will want to know about.

WorkingNation is the exclusive media partner of Talent Forward. We’ll be sharing more from the conference in the coming days and week. Stay tuned.

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.