SoloWorks Cibola celebrates helping people

GRANTS, N.M. - SoloWorks Cibola is commemorating years of helping people train and find work. SoloWorks Cibola Director Shelly Fausett said it has been a busy four years.

“We bring people into the program and we assess their skills; we get them trained in remote work and help them devise a career path,” Fausett said. “We try to get them the job they needed yesterday and try to figure out where they want to be five years from now and then we reverse engineer that and help them fill in any skills and experience gaps.”

Fausett said she has a bunch of employer and training partners that she can connect people to get them working. She said SoloWorks Cibola has helped a few hundred people get the training and skills needed to do the jobs they were looking for.

“I would say 350 or so trained, and a couple of hundred placed,” Cibola Communities Economic Development Foundation Director Eileen Yarborough said. “Not all fulltime, some were parttime and not all were economic based out of state; some were local community.”

Currently, SoloWorks Cibola is working with a company called Concentrix who has asked SoloWorks Cibola to do some screening for their company because it is in a hiring frenzy.

“They even asked us to help with some of their hiring,” Fausett said. “I believe in October alone they hired 2,100 people for their work-at-home division.”

Fausett said her goal is to get as many New Mexicans those jobs as she can.

“We are an economic development program. So, all the people we help are for companies outside the state and when these companies pay their wages that represents a new influx of money into our local economy,” added Fausett. “That is our chief mission. But we do have ability to offer remote training.”

Fausett said with the COVID-19 pandemic some local companies may have to send employees to work from home and some of those employees may need certain skill sets to perform those jobs from home and SoloWorks Cibola can help with that need.”

SoloWorks Cibola partners with many other training facilities to help people with training for a new career.

Fausett said one thing SoloWorks Cibola is working on right now is trying to figure out ways to keep local events going because of the COVID crisis.

“This job is pretty great. I won’t lie,” Fausett said. “I really like to give people an opportunity. It’s exciting.”

CCEDF is the organization that took on piloting this program and SoloWorks Cibola is a department of the CCEDF.

Yarborough said that after a reevaluation of what SoloWorks Cibola was doing in the beginning, they restructured the program so the remote training would be done remotely.

“In reality, we are creating industry one client at a time,” Fausett said.

Yarborough said one of the biggest challenges they have faced other than the COVID crisis is the community not understanding what SoloWorks Cibola does.

“Since Shelly (Fausett) has come on board she has made is much easier for companies to understand what it is we do,” Yarborough said.

Yarborough said the biggest need SoloWorks Cibola has is volume.

“We need volume. People,” Yarborough said. “Send people our way. We need people to work in these jobs.”

SoloWorks Cibola does not stop once a person is placed in a job, Fausett said they continue to work with the individual to get that next job or promotion.

“We had a gentleman we got placed at entry level making $10.50 an hour a year later through the proper training he was making $20.50 per hour,” Fausett said.

Anyone interested in learning more about the SoloWorks Cibola programs should visit soloworks.org or give Shelly a call at 505-658-2250.

“I would like to thank the economic development board for giving us the opportunity to pilot this program here in Grants,” Yarborough said. “This program could have gone anywhere else in the state, but we got it. So, we are really excited about that because we feel this community offers all the different types of opportunities and challenges to prove out a program like this.”