Drawn by ocean, now rooted in R.I.

BUILT FROM SCRATCH: SkillBuilders executives, left to right, John Watson, director of Oracle Database Services; Bob Benoit, Internet architect; Dave Anderson, president; and Gary Belke, director of business operations, take a break at Point Judith Light in Narragansett in May, during an annual meeting to review projects for European customers. / COURTESY MIKE LAPTEW
BUILT FROM SCRATCH: SkillBuilders executives, left to right, John Watson, director of Oracle Database Services; Bob Benoit, Internet architect; Dave Anderson, president; and Gary Belke, director of business operations, take a break at Point Judith Light in Narragansett in May, during an annual meeting to review projects for European customers. / COURTESY MIKE LAPTEW

When it comes to attracting new business, especially high-level tech talent, Rhode Island has one outstanding advantage – the ocean, which, at least in the view of SkillBuilders owner David Anderson, was a big enough draw to move his company from New York.
“My sister went to grad school at URI. We used to visit and fell in love with Rhode Island, especially the proximity to the ocean,” said Anderson, whose New York client list included Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street companies.
“I was really driven not to spend the next 30 years commuting up to four hours a day. I relocated to Rhode Island for quality of life,” said Anderson, who established his company in the Ocean State 19 years ago. “I could see the future was the Internet and the future of training was online.”
The company has a solid foundation as a partner with Oracle, which is used by every Fortune 500 company, said Skillbuilders Business Manager Greg Belke, who also worked in New York and initially moved to Rhode Island to work at a different company.
Changes in the tech industry and the economy prompted changes in Skillbuilders.
“In the ’90s, we’d get a call from JP Morgan Chase or Goldman Sachs and they would book a year’s worth of training,” said Anderson. “Or they’d book three new-hire programs and we’d take a group of 30 new hires and run them through IT training for the specific things the company needed.”
Even after moving the company to Rhode Island, Anderson said the staff still went to New York to provide intensive IT training.
“In 2000, it was like a faucet turning off,” Anderson said. “The large companies we were doing business with, a lot of them on Wall Street, started outsourcing in a major way. All that training is gone because businesses wanted to cut costs and they can have overseas developers. They don’t have to pay for an office or education.”
Anderson realigned his company’s skills, resources and vision to intersect with the needs of the marketplace.
Now more than 50 percent of the training Skillbuilders provides is done online and much more than half of customer meetings are done via the Internet. “We use GoToMeeting a lot – we use screen-sharing,” said Belke.
Skillbuilders has 10 full-time employees, three of those in the South Kingstown office – Anderson, Belke and Bob Benoit, a technician, Internet architect and developer.
Other full-time employees work between customer sites and their homes in England, Austria, Mexico, New Jersey and Massachusetts. One employee in California usually works at Stanford University.
“Stanford has large software-development projects and they need a large staff, so we typically work there for a few months at a time,” said Anderson.
Skillbuilders staff are not home-based or overseas-based to cut costs, but are located where they can best serve customers, said Anderson.
“We were heavily a training company for advanced technology training for large corporations, but that had to change so we could sustain,” he said. “In the 2000s we morphed into what we are today – a thriving consulting company writing custom software for companies and universities. … For instance, we built the energy-efficiency program for Brown [University].”
While Anderson has found talented and experienced people to build and grow Skillbuilders, he said that can be a challenge in Rhode Island.
In an effort to give back to the community and encourage the development of advanced tech talent, and for potential hires, Skillbuilders offered a free Oracle Database administration training class a few years ago in Middletown.
“We didn’t get even one registration. We were dumbfounded. We couldn’t understand where the people were,” said Anderson.
“It’s for people with existing IT skills and was an opportunity for advanced training in a new skill,” said Anderson.
Anderson said he would like to hire more Rhode Islanders, if the customer base allowed it. “We’d like to envision companies such as CVS, GTECH and Fidelity in Smithfield as potential customers,” said Anderson. “That’s how we’ll grow our employee base in Rhode Island.
“When Skillbuilders finds the right way to help them lower their costs, they’ll become our customers,” said Anderson. •

COMPANY PROFILE
SkillBuilders Inc.
OWNER: David Anderson
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Custom software development, Oracle Database administration services, advanced IT training
LOCATION: 213 Robinson St., South Kingstown
YEAR ESTABLISHED: Originally established in Rhode Island in 1994 as Knowledge Network, rebranded in 1996 as SkillBuilders Inc.
EMPLOYEES: 10
ANNUAL SALES: WND

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