Created by Black Women for Black Women, Program Aims to Equip Group Disproportionately Impacted by Unemployment with Critical Digital Skills Needed for Today’s In-Demand Jobs
Dress for Success Mid-Fairfield County is excited to be a partner of Grow with Google: Black Women Lead, a new initiative to provide 100,000 Black women with career development and digital skills training by spring 2022. The initiative is a first-of-its-kind partnership with six organizations led by Black women: Dress for Success, The Links, and four of the National Panhellenic Sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Sigma Gamma Rho, and Zeta Phi Beta. Over the course of the next year, Grow with Google will work with the partner organizations to offer leadership development and digital skills training to support Black women nationwide.
The program is launching at a crucial time for Black female job seekers. Women account for 56% of workforce exits during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Black women accounted for 154,000 jobs lost in December alone. Today, one in six Black women are unemployed, and disproportionately work in sectors impacted by economic downturns. Grow with Google’s Black Women Lead program aims to help close these gaps by working with the partner organizations to provide essential digital skills training in their communities.
“Google is proud to stand with Dress for Success, the Links, and four of the National Panhellenic Sororities to help more Black women get access to the digital skills and career development needed to enter today’s most in-demand jobs,” said Melonie Parker, Chief Diversity Officer, Google.
The initiative’s workshops include resume building, interview training, design thinking for entrepreneurs, how to make business decisions with analytics, and the fundamentals of online marketing. Dress for Success will offer additional career services including interview preparation, mentorship, and networking to women participating in the program.
This initiative is part of Google’s recent $15M commitment to upskill Black job seekers, and the company’s ongoing work to ensure the opportunities created by technology are available to everyone. To reach the widest audience as effectively as possible, partner organizations, including Dress for Success Mid-Fairfield County are being trained in Grow with Google’s curriculum so they can lead their own workshops. Dress for Success Mid-Fairfield County will be hosting and presenting virtual workshops for job seekers such as “Work Smarter with Google’s Productivity Tools”, “Take Charge of Your Career Plan”, and “Power Your Job Search” as well as offering access to online career training for in-demand jobs.
Created by Black women for Black women, this approach represents a model in which the people teaching the courses are intimately familiar with the workplace experiences of the participants. Participants can register for Dress for Success Mid-Fairfield County workshops, and others, https://grow.google/events/
About Grow with Google
Grow with Google was started in 2017 to help Americans grow their skills, careers and businesses. It provides free training, tools, and expertise to help small business owners, veterans and military families, jobseekers and students, educators, startups, and developers. Since Google’s inception, it has helped more than six million Americans grow their skills, careers and businesses. In addition to its virtual presence, Grow with Google has created a network of more than 8,000 partner organizations like libraries, schools, small business development centers, chambers of commerce and nonprofits to help people coast-to-coast.