When I first joined Ascend Indiana in early 2024, I pledged to begin my tenure by listening to our stakeholders, asking them to honestly assess what Ascend does well and what gaps we could fill as an Indiana workforce development intermediary.

Their answers were clear and aligned around one major theme: Ascend has created value over the last 8 years by helping early-in-career Hoosier talent connect with Indiana employers through its on-line job matching platform. Now is the time to scale our work to reach more Hoosiers – as early as elementary school – and more employers so both are equipped to thrive in Indiana’s evolving economy.

That directive from our stakeholders, which included philanthropic and education partners, employers, state leaders and job seekers, led us to our new vision and mission statements and our 2025-29 Strategic Plan, “Pathways to Progress.”

Under the new strategic plan, Ascend will:

• Increase its role as a connector, bringing organizations together to scale proven programs, develop new ideas, policies and initiatives that will create meaningful pathways for students and job seekers;
• Build work-based learning pathways, providing young Hoosiers with real-world experiences, opening their eyes to career possibilities and increasing their employability skills;
• Open more doors through our on-line career-matching platform, The Ascend Network, by inviting school counselors, career services personnel and workforce intermediaries to use the Network as they guide Hoosiers on their career journeys; and
• Do more with data. We will create a consistent understanding of workforce data and its implications to ecosystem stakeholders through original research and a new data repository that will consolidate data from various sources into a centralized location.

I encourage you to read the full plan here to see how we can all work together to build pathways to a stronger workforce in Indiana.

Our Vision: All Hoosiers and all employers are equipped to thrive in Indiana’s evolving economy

Our Mission: Ascend Indiana enables a modern workforce ecosystem.