Vanessa Dodds
CEO/President & Founder
Vanessa Dodds, CEO/President of Connections 4 Success, is a business strategy, professional development, and workforce development expert with over sixteen years of expertise and experience across corporate and small businesses, trades, the public sector, and nonprofit industries. She is an accomplished leader within the Greater Pittsburgh region with a proven track record of helping organizations grow. She serves on Carlow University’s Alumni Advisory Council, is a National Small Business Leadership Council member, and is the past President of the Rotary E-Club of District 7305.
Most recently, Vanessa received the Pittsburgh Business Times 2020 Women of Influence award. Her business acumen, leadership, experience, and capability to solve problems across multiple industries make her methods and insights valuable. Vanessa helps corporate industries tackle important issues like accountability, productivity, and workforce development.
Vanessa has successfully implemented business alignment, process and procedure implementation, process management, strategic growth objectives, fiscal and operational management, program development, and organizational training for numerous award-winning for-profit and nonprofit organizations in the Greater Pittsburgh region. Her work has been imperative to these companies’ ability to create business growth, sustainability, skills development, and methods of successfully pipelining talent into their businesses.
She has been actively shaping workforce solutions for the Greater Pittsburgh, Allegheny County region for over a decade. From 2014 to 2015, she served on Mayor Bill Peduto’s Workforce Development Taskforce, combined with Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald’s office to create a more robust skills training program for Pittsburgh and Allegheny County’s youth and young adults. Vanessa was the primary curriculum creator of the current Learn and Earn Program being used today. This program was created to be a three-tier training program enabling young adults to advance into higher-level internships as they gained industry and soft skills. Her work has been critical in helping to address the 80,000-labor shortage occurring in our region by 2025.
Vanessa’s leadership as CEO, innovator, and owner of Connections 4 Success has enabled her team to implement business alignment successfully, innovative strategies, growth opportunities, and efficiency for corporate, small businesses, and nonprofits at the forefront of their industries.
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