Ron Gifford

President and Chief Executive Officer of The Indy Partnership

"You can't underestimate the importance of an available, trained workforce in economic development. It is the key factor. And you can offer a company or a prospect all of the incentives in the world; you can promise cultural amenities, you can promise even ease-of-access to their customer base, and if you can't deliver a workforce that can actually then allow that company to operate successfully, it will never come to your region. So we will do very well in competing for projects if we continue to boost our workforce, if we continue to boost the skills of our employees and allow them to be in positions where they can attain new skills, where they can present themselves as that trainable workforce."