Dennis Daugaard on Jobs

South Dakota WINS: a 20-point job training plan

1. Preparing our youth to live and work in the 21st Century. The state has strengthened SDMyLife, an online portal for students and parents to research career and academic options.
2. Operation Reach All Veterans: a plan to meet every veteran in South Dakota and to offer assistance & local benefits.
3. Our citizens with disabilities are too often overlooked by employers with job openings. I believe that in this world people with disabilities often develop higher levels of determination and accomplishment. We need to connect employers with employees who have disabilities because it makes good business sense.

Assist disabled with employment; adversity builds character

Good employers know that the most valuable worker is the one who works hard, is loyal, is honorable, and gives an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, whether that worker is disabled or not. These employers know that hiring people with disabilities is good business. They know that adversity builds character, and people with character are good employees.

In the past year, the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation alone assisted over 900 people with disabilities to reach their employment goals.

Help find jobs for those unemployed over 12 weeks

The program requires participants to be actively searching for work, honing old skills or learning new o

Dakota Roots: invite former South Dakotans back home to work

We have also begun work on the New South Dakotans program, which partners with South Dakota companies to recruit skilled out-of-state workers into South Dakota. The program has gotten off to a slower start than I had hoped, but it is beginning to show results. So far, businesses from across South Dakota, 35 of them have enrolled in the program, listing over 250 job openings. They have successfully attracted 55 out-of-state workers, to accept hard-to-fill positions that we couldn't fill after thirty days in South Dakota. I'm hopeful that as more businesses use the program, the success will grow.