SkillUp, a coalition of 60+ partners, is working to help 40 million workers impacted by COVID-19 access training and hiring support for in-demand jobs. At the heart of this effort are partnerships with exceptional training and education organizations like Climb Hire, an innovative workforce development provider with students in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Denver, and Minneapolis. SkillUp partners with organizations like Climb Hire because our missions are in alignment: to give hardworking, ambitious people—who are too often overlooked and underappreciated—a chance to build a better life for themselves and their families.
Today, ability and ambition do not equal success for many hardworking people in the United States of America. The social and communal structures that underlie our society, which are rooted in systemic inequality, fail to give qualified candidates a chance. This paper, a collaboration between Climb Hire and SkillUp, casts a stark spotlight on the barriers and opportunities that we need to address, as employers, operators, and citizens, to redress this injustice.
At its core, this is a story about how “knowwho”—relationships that can be leveraged into recommendations, referrals, and meaningful work experience—is the missing ingredient for workforce training and development in the United States. Climb Hire’s combination of “know-how” (technical skills and signals), “know-who” (social capital and networking skills), and community (built around alums, peers, staff, and employers) has propelled the organization’s rapid growth and early success. Combined, these elements offer a powerful solution to the bedeviling problem of how we can best support motivated people to access better careers.
