Our Blue Skies story begins with the number 70 and ends with training you will love that will also change the life of another person.
What is 70?
70 percent of qualified, college-educated, blind professionals are either underemployed (usually working significantly below skillset and educational standards) or unable to gain any kind of employment at all.
70 percent.
As an organization founded by a blind professional, we first found that ratio unacceptable, then stumbled upon a really special way that we can change it.
Training Your Employees is a Catch-22
Employees of all ages, abilities, and aspirations are demanding training and guidance that will expediate their growth and development. They want to be managers, leaders, executives, and mentors. They want their careers to accelerate and expect opportunities for advancement to be offered by their employers on a regular basis. When such considerations do not come, they leave the organization in search of greener pastures.
However, when offered training and development programming, many employees react with a deep exhale and a desire to skirt the sessions that appear on their calendars. Unfortunately, workshops and trainings often begin with an eyeroll and a derogatory mutter of disapproval as participants sit at tables thinking off all the work they could be getting done in lieu of the “training opportunity.”
Bluntly, employees demand training and development programs but refuse to embrace them when such programs are offered.
Understanding the training conundrum many employers face, Blue Skies USA saw a remarkable opportunity: Give the general professional population information they want in a way they find interesting. Send them home excited to talk to their spouses, family members, friends, and colleagues about the day they had.
Circumventing the training catch-22 in mind, we show our participants how blind professionals travel and interact with their guide dogs and use that relationship to teach them lessons on how to be better leaders, communicators, teammates, and professionals.
Amazingly, the act of learning the intricacies of how a guide dog team functions effectively places employees in position to experience personal and professional growth in a way unlike any other.
Blind Professionals Are World Class Leaders
When you see a blind person walking with a guide dog, you probably say something like “What an amazing dog.” You probably have never looked at the blind person herself and thought, “What an amazing leader.”
That is, however, exactly what she is. A Leader. An expert communicator. A problem solver. A motivator. A strategic planner. A person who has overcome incredible odds, and who continues to beat those odds on a daily basis.
Learning how a guide dog truly works, and how a blind professional leads, motivates, and communicates with her guide will help your teams learn to themselves be better leaders, motivators, and communicators.
It is training people in a way that they want to be trained. Delivering a perspective that they want to hear, from a person to whom they will listen, who explains how they too can develop into world class professionals.
Blue Skies USA has a mission of delivering high-impact, emotional, and relevant leadership development programming that participants love, learn from, and can easily apply to their personal and professional lives.
Though our leadership is blind, we maintain excellent vision, and see that by offering our programming to people like you, we can bring our vision into reality of an equally fair employment market to professionals who are blind.
Fixing a 70% Unemployment Rate
Which brings us back to the number 70.
With a 70 percent unemployment rate, it is clear the world simply does not wish to consider qualified blind professionals in the same regard as their sighted counterparts.
Offering our programing accomplishes two goals:
- It places on full display how the perceived disabilities of a blind professional are in fact super-abilities that can be used as a competitive advantage en route to creating a hyper-productive workforce. Never again will participants look at a blind or disabled person the same way again.
- For every program we sell, we are able to conduct an exhaustive and comprehensive employment search for a professional who is blind. By virtue of your enrollment in our programming, you are very tangibly helping to lower the 70 percent unemployment rate of blind professionals.
The Blue Skies USA vision is to help hiring managers and other supervisors “forget” to think of jobs blind people can do and start offering positions to those who are visually impaired based on that professional’s education, work experience, and ability.
Technology is a blind professional’s best friend, as it has allowed those who cannot see the ability to operate as anyone else would in virtually any business environment. The barriers they face simply should not exist and can be removed with your help.
Help Yourself and Your Team, and Change a Blind Professional’s Life
We want to give blind professionals opportunities equivalent to those of most other similarly qualified people, and ask you to contact Blue Skies USA so we can together learn if any of our services may be a fit for your organization. Doing so will help make at least one more blind professional break through the glass ceiling and realize the professional dreams they deserve to pursue.
Thank you for your help!
There is no fee for your team’s first live webinar and there is no better, practical or more fun leadership diversity, equity, and inclusion training than “Find the Door,” which is delivered by an executive who is blind and his guide dog. Ask any question, learn how a blind person’s travel skills can help accelerate your career, and find out how you too can “Find the Door” to a corporate culture where DEI is fun, profitable, and embraced by all.