Why We Have SkillSmart Day: Celebrating 10 Years
When we founded SkillSmart ten years ago, we had a vision to use technology to make communities stronger by helping workers obtain the skills they needed to be successful working for employers in their community. We recognized that strong communities need workers who can earn a good wage and employers that can thrive because of their workforce. Quickly, we also recognized that it’s difficult to achieve in a community without establishing measurable goals, tracking efforts toward meeting those goals, and having the data to demonstrate how workers and employers are improving. So, we developed additional technology to increase transparency regarding measurable success.
Our organization seamlessly integrates with clients, offering solutions and ideas to advance projects across a multitude of sectors.
We know that in order to help our clients achieve their important goals, that the SkillSmart team has to be one with synergy, understanding of the challenges that our clients face, and to be supportive of each other as we continue to evolve during very dynamic times. Our organization is one that can easily integrate with our clients and comes to the conversation with solutions and ideas to advance the dialogue and help move the project forward. Each of our team members seeks to uphold our principles of innovation, equity, service, accountability, balance and fun. In order to recognize the efforts of our team and SkillSmart’s commitment to each other, we set aside June 1 each year, the anniversary of our incorporation, to pause and say thank you, re-charge a bit and reflect on how we can support making others stronger.
Over the last decade, we have helped make countless communities across the country stronger. Tens of thousands of workers in communities like Prince George’s County, MD, Milwaukee and Racine, WI, Springfield and Everett, MA, Detroit, MI, NYC have been matched to the skills training and job opportunities they needed. We’ve also helped organizations like the Purple Line, the Detroit Pistons, Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, Portland Community College, the St. Louis City SC, Guilford County, NC, the Milwaukee Bucks, the Nashville SC, and Amazon HQ2 and other large-scale infrastructure projects demonstrate how the businesses and residents in their communities are benefitting from the economic investments in their communities.
More and more organizations and communities are taking steps to be more inclusive to make their communities strong and we’re excited to help them achieve this important objective, document their progress and tell each unique story.
So, this June 1 and SkillSmart Day 2023, Jason (Green) and I (Mike Knapp) want to say thank you to each of our clients that we’ve had the pleasure to serve and grow with during the past decade. We also want to say a heartfelt thank you to our SkillSmart team who have each chosen to join us on this journey to make stronger communities – we are honored to serve with you and appreciate all that you do each day.
