Foundations for Success
Stop Surviving. Start Winning.
Workforce Training & Professional Development for Early-Career Professionals
The Problem Is Real
6 out of 10 young professionals don’t survive their first 90 days on the job. Not because they lack talent. But because nobody ever taught them the unwritten rules of the workplace.
Who We Are
Foundations for Success is a workforce training and professional development organization built specifically for early-career professionals. We equip them with the practical workplace skills that close the gap between landing the job and making a lasting impact in it.
We also partner with organizations, workforce development agencies, and schools who want to invest in their people before that gap becomes a problem.
What We Offer
Workplace Etiquette Course
A self-paced online course covering the essential skills every early-career professional needs: professional appearance, communication, workplace behavior, handling difficult situations, and more.
Workshop Series
Interactive, facilitated sessions available in-person or virtually, designed for teams, cohorts, and organizations. Our flagship series, From Anxiety to Offer, equips early-career professionals to win the interview process across five power-packed sessions.
Custom Training Solutions
Have a specific challenge within your organization? We’ll come to you, assess the need, and design targeted training, materials, and resources around that issue — then facilitate the experience to drive real behavior change. No generic solutions. Just practical training built around your people and your problem.
Corporate & Institutional Partnerships
We work directly with employers, HR teams, workforce organizations, and schools to bring Foundations for Success programming to your people at scale.
Who We Serve
We serve early-career professionals and recent graduates who are ready to grow. We also partner with the organizations, managers, and leaders who want to invest in getting them off to the right start.
“We teach young professionals the things nobody ever taught them so they can stop surviving at work and start winning.“
Our Team
Foundations for Success was built by practitioners, not theorists. Our team brings more than 75 years of combined experience in learning and development, instructional design, workforce training, and corporate leadership. We have trained thousands of learners, worked on the front lines, and seen firsthand what it takes to help early-career professionals not just survive at work but win at it.
C. David McIntyre
David knows what it feels like to be new and figure it out. Before he spent 15 years designing workforce training programs, he worked the front lines in restaurants, retail, and the corporate world, learning the unwritten rules of the workplace the same way most people do: through trial and error. That experience never left him, and it shapes everything he builds.
Today, David brings nearly 20 years of Instructional Design and classroom, virtual, and seminar-based training experience across healthcare, federal programs, insurance, telecommunications, and nonprofit sectors. He has designed large-scale training initiatives, blended learning curricula, Train-the-Trainer programs, and performance support tools, helping thousands of learners succeed in high-performance environments.
He also spent more than a decade as an on-air radio personality, MC, and performance specialist, which means he knows how to hold a room, connect with an audience, and make learning stick. That combination of frontline experience, instructional and training expertise, and communication skills is exactly what Foundations for Success is built on.
Professional Membership: Association for Talent Development (ATD) Atlanta
Lynn Nester
Lynn started where many of our learners start: in a frontline customer service role, figuring out how to show up, perform, and grow. She was recognized for her performance and selected to train others, and that moment set the course for a career spanning more than 40 years in workforce development, training, and customer experience.
With a Master’s degree in Adult Education, Lynn has led training initiatives across utilities and insurance, consistently delivering outcomes that speak for themselves: 95 to 100 percent completion and graduation rates. Her expertise covers technical training, soft-skills integration, regulatory compliance, and coaching teams to improve learner engagement and performance.
Lynn understands the young professional because she has spent a career meeting them exactly where they are. She brings that same investment and care to everything Foundations for Success creates.
Phillip Rich
Phillip has spent more than 20 years making sure learning actually works. Not just looks good on a slide deck, but genuinely changes how people show up and perform. With a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and deep roots in instructional design and corporate training, he brings both the strategic and the practical to every program Foundations for Success builds.
He started in the nonprofit sector, developing and facilitating leadership training for diverse audiences and eventually delivering programs to more than 500 participants across multiple cities. He later founded a digital content business and built expertise in eLearning modules, job aids, and user-focused curriculum design. Since 2018 he has focused on instructional design and corporate training for a federal benefits administrator, creating scalable learning solutions for distributed teams.
Phillip’s work ensures that every Foundations for Success course is not just well-intentioned, but effective, scalable, and built around the learner.
Our Philosophy
We design learning experiences that are practical, engaging, and directly applicable to the workplace. We believe that every early-career professional who walks through our programs, workshops and experiences deserves an A-ha! moment, a sense of belonging, and the tools to start winning. That is what we show up to deliver, every time.
Ready to bring Foundations for Success to your organization?
Let’s talk.
foundations4success.com