TheLadders & StreetWise Partners Celebrate a Year of Success
A few years ago, a former employee from TheLadders met Orlando Ashford, a Board of Directors member from StreetWise Partners, the wonderful New York-based organization that provides job-skills training and career mentoring for job candidates facing employment barriers. They quickly discovered that TheLadders shared StreetWise Partners’ vision of helping individuals improve their lives by taking proactive steps for obtaining better jobs. In December 2011, TheLadders’ Founder & Chairman Marc Cenedella, along with CEO & Co-founder, Alex Douzet, announced StreetWise Partners as the official non-profit of their company. For more than a year, the partnership has continued to soar.
Last fall, StreetWise Partners helped announce that TheLadders had expanded to the sub-100K+ arena, enabling the online job-matching service to help all career-driven professionals, including StreetWise Partners’ motivated job candidates. However, the full partnership really bloomed in a conference room in December 2011, when a small team of StreetWise Partners and TheLadders employees quickly hashed out goals, and began planning our first live training seminar.
With 2013 on the horizon, we can reflect on a year’s worth of fantastic workshops and events, and we are more thankful than ever for this mutually rewarding partnership. Commemorating their inaugural year together, StreetWise Partners’ Executive Director, Tracey Allard, and TheLadders’ Director of Account Management, Thomas Murphy, share their most memorable highlights during a brief Q & A.
1. Why do you think that the partnership between StreetWise Partners and TheLadders is such a good match, benefitting so many job seekers?
Tracey Allard, StreetWise Partners: This partnership is a perfect alignment of the mission of StreetWise Partners and the business purpose of TheLadders. Together, we arm jobseekers with the tools, know-how, access, and resources to build their careers. For StreetWise Partners, the talents and expertise of TheLadders’ staff add value in the form of current career best practices, effective coaching techniques, and results-oriented, job-search strategies. The outcomes include a strengthened program curriculum and better-prepared mentors to help our trainees achieve short-, mid- and long-term goals and ultimately, to break the cycle of poverty and get on a path to economic self-sufficiency.
Thomas Murphy, TheLadders: I think the main driver of our success has been what we at TheLadders call “the right DNA.” Like any fast-moving tech company, our employees have to wear many hats. Whereas this may seem daunting to most, we embrace every challenge as an opportunity, from building a new website to creating a training program for StreetWise Partners in under 60 days. From day one, I knew that Tracey and her team had an identical attitude. Referring to the StreetWise Partners team as lean would be an understatement, as their reach makes them appear 10 times larger. To be frank, we knew all along we would be successful since we have a group of people fully dedicated to one goal of using their expertise to help others arm themselves with the skills needed for finding their next job.
2. In addition to celebrating the one-year anniversary of your partnership, StreetWise Partners is celebrating its 15-year anniversary and TheLadders will celebrate its 10-year anniversary in 2013. How does it feel to be a pioneer in your industry, especially as your efforts benefits so many job seekers?
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