PeopleShores Leverages Qlik Cloud Analytics To Help Underrepresented Populations Obtain Skills, Employment and Confidence
The Public Benefit Corporation Teams Up With Qlik To Empower Employees With Cloud Analytics Skills Needed by Enterprises Moving to SaaS
Underserved communities in the United States are facing unprecedented instability and unemployment. Without the skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow, these communities will continue to suffer. Those skills are increasingly technology-based, with about one million jobs in the United States remaining unfilled due to a lack of appropriate talent. That’s why Qlik, through Qlik.org, its corporate responsibility arm, partnered with PeopleShores to help fulfill its mission to empower the underserved and underrepresented – minorities, the homeless, those with Autism Spectrum Disorders, destitute women and veterans. The organization provides these populations with paid, on-site training, jobs and the confidence of having career path longevity. Working with Qlik, PeopleShores is able to train a cohort of its new employees on Qlik Sense cloud analytics, with the aim of creating a match between customers who are moving to SaaS with the skilled support they need to make that move with confidence.
PeopleShores is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with an objective of bringing technology-oriented careers to economically challenged communities in the United States, working with all organizations to meet their needs. Julie Kae, our VP of Sustainability and DE&I, as well as the Executive Director of Qlik.org, learned of the organization through internal channels at Qlik and studied PeopleShores' mission in further detail. Immediately, Kae saw the potential to help when discussing the organization’s needs with Darryl Pieroni, VP Operations and Business Delivery at PeopleShores. Together, Kae and Pieroni devised a training program for those who showed an aptitude for analytics, helping them become skilled in Qlik Sense, so they could assist organizations in migrating their Qlik analytics deployments to SaaS environments.
“What impressed me so much about PeopleShores was its charter – to take the people most marginalized in society, give them the means of obtaining jobs by training them, and then give them those jobs they trained for,” said Kae. “PeopleShores also knows its employee aren’t always mobile. They need a place to stay and work, which promotes a level of comfort they might not have as in-field consultants. So, the organization creates tech centers, where its employees can come in each day and be strengthened by being surrounded by those of similar circumstances. Working with the employees from PeopleShores’ Clarksdale, Mississippi’s center, we just completed our first project with PeopleShores, helping migrate Smile Train’s analytics to a SaaS environment.”
Smile Train is a nonprofit that supplies local medical professionals with training, funding and resources to provide free reconstructive cleft-palate surgery and comprehensive cleft care to children globally. As with many organizations, they were looking to make the move to the cloud, knowing the benefits of its scalability and cost efficiencies; however, they lacked the funds for the migration. Through an arrangement between Qlik and PeopleShores, Smile Train was able to successfully move to a Qlik Sense cloud analytics environment, using employees at PeopleShores who had completed the Qlik Sense training program. Smile Train is now leveraging the deployment for its financial and grant management systems, fraud detection, and to measure the impact the number of cleft-palate surgeries through demographic analyses.
“I’m thrilled that we were able to help an organization like Smile Train, which is providing such a vital service to so many children, many of whom come from impoverished conditions,” said Pieroni. “The project also is a great example we can utilize in advancing our purpose of helping to solve deep-rooted biases and challenge conventional thinking. Conventional wisdom presumes that the under-educated can only perform low-skill jobs, which results in a shiftless workforce, a loss of local development, broken support systems and increased poverty. With Qlik, we are helping to change those assumptions and their consequences, and move our culture in a better, more sustainable direction.”
Qlik is looking forward to expanding our partnerships with organizations like PeopleShores, whose important work of increasing the representation of those whose lives remain largely hidden from the mainstream is a core tenet of our DE&I efforts. In the end, we must have faith in those who have lost faith in themselves. You never know: They could end up being our most valuable assets, as our society progresses to being more inclusive and equitable.
Contact Julie Kae if you would like to understand how PeopleShores can assist with your Qlik Sense application migration. You can also reach out to PeopleShores directly by emailing Darryl Pieroni.
