About Us
Learn more about who RIT Certified is and how we serve our community and the global workforce through professional training and workforce development.
Align Your Path With Your Passion
Our Vision and Mission
Our vision is to disrupt educational pathways to ensure all students have access to training that promotes economic empowerment.
Vision
The job economy needs workers at all levels. Our mission is to help lift people into life sustaining work. Working with industry, our goal is to identify key skills for a successful workforce and translate those skills into relevant and rigorous training. At RIT Certified, we break down barriers to create access to work, challenge the current systems of the job economy, and promote innovation.
Mission
Our Work with Employers
At RIT Certified, we work closely with employers to ensure that our programs are designed for the current realities of the workforce. Our partnerships with employers ensure that we’re creating courses and mastery certificates that will prepare students to hit the ground running with the skills and knowledge they need for their first day on the job.
We also partner with employers to create bespoke programming for internal training and upskilling. These customized programs help employers with their internal talent pipeline to assist with long term retention and ensure that employees are able to stay up to date with changes in their industry in our ever evolving world.
Community Impact
Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative
The Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI) is a community organization whose mission is to create an equitable Greater Rochester by providing tools to help impoverished people in our community achieve upward mobility out of poverty.
Promoting economic empowerment is important to RIT Certified, and through our work with RMAPI we seek to build a bridge between people looking for paths to life sustaining work and our courses that can help them achieve that goal.
Rochester City School District
Work with the Rochester City School District (RCSD) has given RIT Certified the opportunity to provide disadvantaged students with education about the potential pathways for their future careers.
RIT Certified strives to serve both populations who go to traditional four year colleges and those who want to directly enter the workforce, and through our work on the Chip Experience with RCSD, students gained exposure into different roles that exist in the semiconductor industry and where they can fit in it.
RochesterWorks
RochesterWorks is an organization that provides free employment and workforce development services for job seekers at every stage of their lives with services designed for youth workers, adults, and employers.
Through our work with this organization, RIT Certified is able to connect with motivated individuals who want to discover education to employment pathways. We also have a career specialist who works partially from RochesterWorks to provide career guidance and support services.
Empire State Development
RIT Certified received a $999,000 grant from Empire State Development (ESD) for our “Promoting Choice: Alternative Pathways into Work and Economic Mobility” plan in their first round of grant awards in December 2022.
With this funding, we are building programming for six programs in critical industries as well as providing employer training to prepare employers to support students from historically marginalized communities.
How We Work
Employer Informed
We work with employers to discover what they need from their employees so that our courses can properly prepare students for the realities of working in the industry they’re studying.
Mastery Certificates
Mastery certificates are a credential RIT Certified created to show the mastery of a specific skill set. Our mastery certificate programs equip students with the ability to use their new skills and knowledge in actual applications on the job.
Designed for Real Life
Our courses are designed to prepare you for the realities of what it will be like to work in the field. You’ll be able to start applying the concepts you’re learning on the job immediately.
Skills Framework
The skills framework is a unique, data-driven process RIT Certified uses to ensure that our courses give students the skills and knowledge they need for critical work functions and key activities so our courses are practical and useful.