Northern Indiana Workforce Board Names SlateUp Its 2025 Partner, WIA Training Dollars Now Have a Clearer Front Door

The Northern Indiana Workforce Board named SlateUp its 2025 partner of the year and expanded the South Bend-based manufacturing talent marketplace's role to business services representative for WIA Region 2, covering Elkhart, St. Joseph, Marshall, Fulton, and Kosciusko counties. SlateUp, founded in 2024 by the Notre Dame-anchored 1842 Fund, started inside a single WorkOne office in Elkhart delivering AI-generated, employer-validated career paths to unemployment claimants. NIWB expanded the arrangement based on engagement results.

The structural change is straightforward: WIA dollars are federal workforce training funds most manufacturers never access because the application path is opaque. NIWB's move positions SlateUp as a lower-friction front door to both workforce board services and WIA-eligible training funding in Region 2. If you have open roles in those five counties, there is now a more direct path to filling them with co-funded training support. One note on a figure circulating from SlateUp's press release: the 83,000 unfilled Indiana manufacturing roles figure comes from Kexus Indiana's 2022 report, a point-in-time estimate, not an annual recurring gap. If your team is using that number in planning conversations, frame it as an estimated 83,000 unfilled advanced manufacturing roles as of the last full Kexus benchmark.