FROM THE C.E.O
I have been blessed to serve in many different capacities throughout highly technical industries around the world. As a leader and hiring manager, I would sit on interview panels and cringe internally every time a young or relatively inexperienced Black or brown person failed to demonstrate key interpersonal skills that ultimately led them to not be selected for the position. This happened a lot. I was constantly torn between a desire to give my people a chance at a great-paying job and a better life and the need to choose the best (most capable and skilled) candidate for the job. However, without the skills I deemed necessary, I knew I could not, in good conscience, do what some of my white counterparts have done for generations and choose based on ethnicity.  

 Sensing that this was a systemic issue, I called upon friends from the Black community, several of whom served in HBCUs and various companies, to form a Black Leadership Think Tank. We met and I asked them if my experience was an outlier due to the highly technical nature of my places of work or if it was more commonplace regardless of the industry vertical. While they agreed that this was indeed a real problem, they could not or would not contribute to a meaningful solution. 

So, I set out to design and develop a relatively low-cost and readily accessible/available solution to empower and enable our people who entered the corporate workforce to flourish not only in corporate America but in the broader global workplace. noticed that a theme was forming in my mind, mapping out six major skill gaps: