The jobs you bring in should go to the people already here.

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What we do

Five areas of work. Five competencies we score.

A resident spends eight weeks on five things. Every exercise runs on their own situation, never a case study, and a facilitator runs the room.

• Behavior. How somebody acts when nobody is telling them what to do.
• Skills. The specific thing an employer here is hiring for.
• Career development. What the next rung is, what it pays, and how people actually get onto it.
• Personal development. Money, confidence, transport, childcare. The things that decide whether any of the rest holds.
• Leadership. Running a shift, running a team, or running your own thing.

Those five are the curriculum. They are not the report. You cannot measure whether somebody was taught leadership, only whether they have started acting like one. So the report scores five things you can watch a person do.

Four come from career adaptability, built for people changing jobs rather than managers running teams. The fifth is initiative, the construct with the trial behind it. None needs a supervisor’s title, which is what matters when a line cook and a laid off analyst are in the same room.

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• Names the target. Says out loud where they intend to be in two years, and what has to happen first.
• Makes the call. Decides their own next move, instead of waiting to be told what the options are.
• Finds out. Asks somebody who does the job what it pays and what it takes, rather than guessing at it.
• Bets on themselves. Puts in for it before feeling ready, and comes back after a no.
• Takes initiative. Starts the thing nobody asked for, and is still at it in month three.

The skills half

The syllabus is built per town

Behavior is the constant. Skills are not, and no town should accept a syllabus that turns up already written. Three inputs decide what gets taught.

• What is here now. The employers in your county and the work they are actually hiring for, from your own labor market data rather than a national list.
• What you are chasing. The target industries already in your strategy. Leland has published its own: life sciences, information technology, medical technology, aerospace, marine biology and wind energy.
• The gap between the two. Where the work you want and the people you have do not line up is exactly where the skills teaching goes.

That third one is the whole job. A county with an employer base it cannot staff and residents it cannot place has one problem, not two, and the gap between those lists is the shape of it.

So this part is built with you before a cohort starts, and it is rebuilt when the target list changes. Behavior transfers between towns. The skills half does not, and a program that pretends otherwise is selling you somebody else’s curriculum.

The case

Why a town pays for this

Most American metros have the same shape of problem. Employment is fine. Wages are not. And the growth that does land fills up with people who moved in for it.

It compounds quietly, and there is a clock on it: every four years somebody stays in low wage work, the odds of getting out roughly halve. By year ten they are down to about one in a hundred. A town is not deciding whether to fix this. It is deciding how long to wait.

The four numbers below are Wilmington’s, because that is where the first cohorts run. Every town gets the same four built from its own county.

Wherever the county is, site consultants, the people a company pays to choose where it lands, stopped asking only who lives there now. They ask what the pipeline looks like, and close to six in ten manufacturers name talent as a top concern. So the staffing answer and the political answer turn out to be the same asset.

The program

Eight weeks, then ninety days

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The exits

Four ways out, and the college gets three

Homegrown does not teach a trade and does not want to. When somebody needs a credential they go to the college or the career center, and we report whether they enrolled. A college funded on enrollment is better off for it. This is a feeder, not a competitor.

Cultural architecture

Culture is the other side of the desk

Somebody who moves up into a badly run workplace comes back down. Turnover is not a resident problem and retention is not a resident achievement. Both are built into how an employer actually runs, day to day.

So there is a second thing SideKix does, and towns tend to need it once the first one starts working: cultural architecture. Designing how a workplace is meant to operate, putting that in place, and repairing the parts quietly costing an employer its people. Same behavioral basis as the resident work, pointed at the organization instead of the person.

For a town it is what holds up the local fill rate and the twelve month retention. Placing somebody is the easy number to report. Keeping them is what that number is actually measuring.

The deliverable

What a town gets

• A cohort. The residents you nominate, or that we recruit alongside you.
• The bench report, quarterly. Who is in motion, toward what, how far along. Written to hand to a site consultant, not to file.
• A local fill rate. For the employers you name, the share of new hires who already lived in the county.
• The handoffs, tracked. Referred to the college, and separately, actually enrolled.
• A facilitator. A person in a room, not a video library with a progress bar.
• The SideKix platform, for everybody in the cohort. The community, the resource library, the self discoveries, live events, training, and AI guidance from Kix. The eight weeks end. This does not, which is how somebody gets help with the thing that hits them in month five.

The numbers

How it is measured

Set before the first cohort starts, not chosen afterwards to suit the result.

Measure	What it is
Local fill rate	Share of new hires at the employers you name who already lived in the county. The number that decides the next council vote, and the one almost nobody reports.
Documented move	Advanced, switched, enrolled or registered a business within 180 days.
Wage change	Baseline in week one, verified at day 180.
Completion	Target 70 per cent, the standard federally funded short programs are held to.
Twelve month retention	Still living and working in the county a year on.

The money

How it is paid for

• Economic development budget. Fastest, and the one an ED office controls outright. Most first cohorts should start here.
• The workforce board. Entrepreneurial skills training and microenterprise services are allowable under federal workforce law. Board procurement runs on its own annual cycle, so plan ahead rather than counting on it.
• Sector partnership and employer engagement grants. North Carolina funds local boards for exactly this, the Cape Fear board included.
• Chambers and employers, for the advancement track, where the employer keeps the person.

Worth settling early: federal training vouchers require a program that leads to a credential. Homegrown does not, by design. It is the layer in front of the credential. That keeps it off the state provider list and out of voucher money, and keeps it fast to start and free to change.

The first cohorts

Where it starts

The program is built to run anywhere with a county, an employer base and residents who are stuck. What changes between towns is the target industries, the local numbers and the weighting of the four exits. The eight weeks, the five competencies and the reporting do not change.

SideKix is in Wilmington, so the Cape Fear region is where the first cohorts run, and it happens to be a useful pair. Wilmington needs people who already have jobs to move up. Leland, which has more than doubled since 2010, needs residents who can build a career without crossing the bridge every morning. Same program, weighted differently, measured the same way. If it works for two towns that unalike, it travels.

Homegrown has not run yet. The first towns are design partners: they shape it, they get founding terms, and their results are the evidence every town after them sees.

Why behavior

Teaching people things does not work

This is one of the few corners of workforce development where the evidence is clean, and it says the same thing every time. Content fades. Behavior compounds.

One caveat, up front rather than buried. That trial ran with small business owners in West Africa, not a Carolina metro, and by year seven the gains were much stronger for the men in it. It is the best evidence this method has, and it is not proof of what happens here. That is what the first cohorts are for.