Job Ready Indy: Airtable Tracking System at EmployIndy

Job Ready Indy: The Airtable Tracking System Behind a Citywide Credential

Job Ready Indy is a citywide job readiness credential from EmployIndy, the workforce development board in Indianapolis. Young people earn it by working through a badge-based employability skills curriculum, and they do that inside programs run by local community organizations, usually as part of a summer or after-school program. I was on staff at EmployIndy when the program needed a way to keep track of all of it, and my part was the system underneath: I set up the Airtable base that Job Ready Indy ran on.

I want to be clear about who did what, because a credential like this has a lot of people behind it. The program team built the partnerships, trained the trainers and ran the program day to day. I was never a partner or a trainer. What I built was the place where all of their work got recorded, so the team could see the whole program at once and report on it with confidence.

Job Ready Indy: results at a glance

• Service: an Airtable setup for a citywide credential program
• One Airtable base holding five kinds of information: partner organizations, trainers, workshops and cohorts, badges, and reporting
• A program that grew to 225+ trained professionals
• 3,600+ participants served
• The program has continued to grow under EmployIndy’s team since

My Role

My role was the systems build. I set up the Airtable base while I was on EmployIndy’s staff, and I shaped it around the way the program team already worked. The partnerships, the trainer certification, the workshops and the program itself all belonged to the program team, and the base existed to support them.

About Job Ready Indy

The idea behind the credential is simple. It gives young people a recognized way to show an employer that they have the everyday skills a job asks for, and it gives employers a signal they can trust because the same curriculum stands behind every badge.

What makes it complicated to run is where the teaching happens. The curriculum is delivered by community-based organizations through programs they already run, so the credential lives inside many different organizations at once. Each partner has its own staff who need to be trained to teach it, its own schedule of workshops, and its own group of young people working toward their badges.

The Problem

When a program is delivered by many organizations, the information about it gets spread out in the same way. The program team needed answers to questions that sound simple: which partner organizations are active right now, which of their staff have been trained and certified to teach the curriculum, which workshops have run and for which group of participants, and which young people have earned which badges. Each of those answers could easily end up in a different place, often in a partner’s own files.

Without one shared record, answering those questions means collecting files from partners and stitching them together by hand, and the totals are only as good as the last person who copied them. A credential that was meant to grow across the whole city needed something sturdier than that, especially when leadership and funders would be asking how many people it had reached.

How I Approached It

Before I set anything up, I looked at how the program actually moved from start to finish. A partner organization signs on. Its staff go through training and become certified to deliver the curriculum. Those trainers run workshops for groups of young people, and the young people earn badges as they complete each part, which add up to the credential. Every step involves a different kind of thing, and each thing is connected to the ones around it: a trainer belongs to a partner, a workshop is led by a trainer, and a badge is earned by a participant in a workshop.

That chain of connected steps is exactly what Airtable handles well. Airtable looks like a spreadsheet, but it lets you keep each kind of thing in its own table and then connect the tables, so a trainer’s record can point to the partner they work for and a workshop’s record can point to the trainer who led it. If you have only ever used spreadsheets, the difference is that you enter a piece of information once and every connected record can see it, instead of retyping a partner’s name on ten different tabs and hoping all ten stay correct.

What I Built

One base for the whole program

I set up a single Airtable base built to track the program from end to end. The team had one place to look instead of a folder of spreadsheets, and everyone on the program team was working from the same records.

Partners and trainers

The base kept a record for every partner organization and for every trainer connected to it. Each trainer’s record showed where they stood in their certification, so the program team could see which partners had certified staff ready to teach and which were still getting there.

Workshops and badges

Workshops and cohorts, meaning each group of young people going through the curriculum together, had their own records that were connected to the trainer and the partner behind them. The badges participants earned were tracked against those workshops, so progress toward the credential could be followed across every partner at once rather than one organization at a time.

Reporting

Because partners, trainers, workshops and badges were all connected, the team could pull program reporting straight from the same records the work was tracked in. A count of trained professionals or participants served came from the base itself, so there was no separate tally that someone had to remember to keep in sync.

How the Team Used It

A good system lets the people running a program use it without thinking much about the system. With this base, someone on the program team could look up a partner and see its trainers and their certification status together in one view. When a workshop ran, it was recorded against the trainer and partner who delivered it. When leadership asked how the credential was growing, the answer came from records that already existed.

It also meant the program did not depend on any one person’s memory. Someone new to the program team could open the base and understand the shape of the program, because the structure itself showed how partners, trainers, workshops and badges fit together. I build every system with that in mind, and this project is a big part of why.

The Results

• Job Ready Indy ran on one Airtable base instead of scattered partner files
• Partners, trainer certification, workshops and badges were tracked in one connected place
• The system supported a program that grew to 225+ trained professionals and 3,600+ participants
• Program reporting came from the same records the team worked in every day
• The program has continued to grow under EmployIndy’s team since

The numbers above belong to the program team and the partners who did the work. My contribution was making sure all of that work had a home, so it could be counted, reported and built on as the credential spread across the city.

Related case studies and reading

• Case study: Live Wilder Studio: an Airtable dashboard fed by Dubsado
• Read: Airtable: A database in a spreadsheet
• Read: Signs Your Nonprofit Has Outgrown Its Spreadsheets

Running a program through outside partners?

If your partners, trainers and outcomes live in separate spreadsheets, I build Airtable systems that keep them in one place. See Done-For-You Airtable Setup and how I work with nonprofits.