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The Navajo Nation Talent Marketplace

A conversation with Moroni Benally, Aspire Ability head of public policy and partnerships, and Amber Garrison Duncan, C-BEN executive vice president
By Ramona Schindelheim
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In this episode of Work in Progress, Moroni Benally of Aspire Ability and Amber Garrison Duncan of C-BEN join me to discuss the just-announced workforce initiative, the Navajo Nation Talent Marketplace, which will be the first-ever repository of all jobs available on the Navajo reservation and the skills needed to fill them.

The Navajo Nation covers a lot of territory – nearly 27,000 square miles in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. There are 253,124 enrolled tribal members with 168,000 individuals (66%) living there on the land.

Nearly 36% of Navajo households live below the federal poverty line, and “unemployment and poverty fuel an ongoing pattern of migration and brain drain that undermines the viability of the Navajo Nation,” according to the news release announcing the new online Talent Marketplace.

The two-year initiative is designed to address longstanding structural barriers to employment and economic growth on the reservation.

“Having an online, publicly available resource linking jobs and education programs will match people to the full range of opportunities across the reservation,” says Moroni Benally, a member of the Navajo Nation and head of public policy and partnerships at Aspire Ability. “It’s a critical step in our nation’s long-term efforts to offer all Navajo – from our 3,500 yearly high school graduates to those who moved away – access to credentials that tie to well paid jobs within the nation.”

Benally says, “A necessary first step for the whole Talent Marketplace is understanding what jobs are out there in the Navajo Nation already. We hear a lot of entrenched tropes about Indian country because no one has put forth the effort to actually identify the jobs.”

“So, up to about a year ago, we were operating under the assumption that the Navajo Nation was only creating about a 100 to 200 jobs a year. But we found 2,100 available vacant jobs in the private sector in the Navajo Nation. There’s another 2,000 that are in the public sector, government jobs,” Benally explains.

Duncan adds, “The focus of the project is to make sure people know that there are jobs at home, to know that there is quality education available on the reservation. A lot of times what we are hearing is that people thought they had to leave the reservation to find education and work.”

This is an important starting point, she says. Knowing what jobs are available on the reservation clarifies for nearby competency-based learning institutions how they might realign their curriculum to serve the community. “The first thing we’re doing is working with the colleges to bring the job board to them, to bring those discreet knowledge, skills, abilities, things that people will have to know and be able to do to perform those jobs.”

Benally says right now there are jobs in health care, construction, and education, but the type of jobs will grow exponentially as broadband is further implemented throughout the Navajo Nation.

Duncan agrees, saying that people will be able to learn the skills needed for remote jobs in cybersecurity and IT. “There are also opportunities to think about Salesforce and Google and AWS, all of those components of ‘now I can live at home and perform those jobs.’ It also opens the door for online learning.”

“We want to be able to provide a space to bring our people back home to really build a Nation and to fulfill that mandate that our elders gave us…of coming home and bringing the goodness that you have,” Benally explains.

You learn more about how Aspire Ability and C-BEN plan to roll out the plan in the podcast. Listen here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 270: Moroni Benally, Aspire Ability, and Amber Garrison Duncan, C-BEN
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa Panzer
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0

Download the transcript here.
You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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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.

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