Raphael John-Lall

With re­mote work be­com­ing more preva­lent in the cor­po­rate world, CEO of Vibe Con­nec­tions, Am­i­na Blake-Fore­man, is hop­ing that her com­pa­ny makes a con­tri­bu­tion giv­en the Gov­ern­ment’s new plan which promis­es thou­sands of jobs.

“A na­tion’s strength is not car­ried by its gov­ern­ment alone; it ris­es when its peo­ple choose to stand to­geth­er, ho­n­our their du­ty and lift one an­oth­er up. In uni­ty, we be­come the guardians of our coun­try’s fu­ture — and Vibe Con­nec­tions is do­ing our part. With so many tal­ent­ed, ed­u­cat­ed T&T na­tion­als un­em­ployed, we are com­mit­ted to help­ing as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble,” she said.

In a Zoom in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian last Thurs­day, Blake-Fore­man who is the CEO of a vir­tu­al staffing com­pa­ny, said this year, they cel­e­brate four years since their com­pa­ny was formed in the mid­dle of the dark days of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic where every­one was just be­gin­ning to ad­just to the new world of on­line school­ing and work.

In­cor­po­rat­ed lo­cal­ly, Vibe Con­nec­tions is the sis­ter com­pa­ny of Vibe Con­nec­tions LLC based in New Jer­sey.

The US-based of­fice ac­quires clients and pro­vides cus­tomer ser­vice to them. The sis­ter com­pa­ny in T&T screens the can­di­dates, match­es them to jobs and does all the lo­cal sup­port.

So far, her com­pa­ny has al­ready placed over 140 peo­ple in re­mote jobs, pay­ing more than $16 mil­lion in salaries.

Some ex­am­ples of the vir­tu­al jobs are ex­ec­u­tive as­sis­tant (EA), in­side sale agents (ISA), call cen­tre rep­re­sen­ta­tive and so­cial me­dia as­sis­tant/graph­ic de­sign­er.

She ex­plained that T&T na­tion­als re­ceive vir­tu­al em­ploy­ment with US com­pa­nies, pri­mar­i­ly in the re­al es­tate in­dus­try, oth­er sim­i­lar in­dus­tries and in­dus­tries ex­ter­nal to re­al es­tate; one such re­al es­tate com­pa­ny is Keller Williams.

She added they be­came the na­tion­al-pre­ferred ven­dor for vir­tu­al as­sis­tants for Keller Williams, which is the num­ber one re­al es­tate bro­ker­age and fran­chise in the US, which has 180,000 agents. As a re­sult of that part­ner­ship, Vibe Con­nec­tions has been match­ing about 20 job seek­ers with em­ploy­ers per month.

Blake-Fore­man who cur­rent­ly re­sides in New Jer­sey, left her home in Fyz­abad at age 16 for bet­ter op­por­tu­ni­ties in the Unit­ed States where she be­gan her life in the re­al es­tate in­dus­try.

She start­ed as an as­sis­tant at 16 and earned her li­cence at 19. She rose to com­plete more than 1,000 trans­ac­tions over two decades.

In 2017, she was recog­nised as the top re­al es­tate agent in the New Eng­land re­gion, and a year lat­er be­came a na­tion­al re­al es­tate coach and CEO for Keller Williams in Con­necti­cut.

Job train­ing

Two weeks ago, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar promised 50,919 jobs as she un­veiled an am­bi­tious Re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion Blue­print with a wave of in­fra­struc­ture projects.

Hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly built a name for the com­pa­ny in the vir­tu­al job mar­ket in the pri­vate sec­tor, Blake-Fore­man now wants to build a part­ner­ship with the Gov­ern­ment.

While she said there has been no of­fi­cial agree­ment as yet, she has been in talks with the Min­istry of Labour and now the Min­istry of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing for on-the-job train­ing (OJT) can­di­dates be­ing trained by her com­pa­ny.

“Feed­back from OJTs sug­gest that while there is gen­uine in­ter­est in in­no­v­a­tive ap­proach­es like on­line trainee en­gage­ment, the or­gan­i­sa­tion must wait for ex­plic­it gov­ern­men­tal au­tho­ri­sa­tion. The cur­rent pri­or­i­ties are com­plet­ing the fis­cal bud­get for 2025-2026 and ob­tain­ing the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary’s ap­proval for new train­ing provider part­ner­ships.”

She gave more de­tails on how they will be trained.

“It is about ed­u­cat­ing some of these young­sters who have ap­plied to OJT and to get them in­to our boot camp to pre­pare them for the vir­tu­al work­space. It would be huge be­cause then it will just help us to be able to help so many more in­di­vid­ual jobs. So that OJT part­ner­ship is go­ing to be a crit­i­cal one for growth.”

She said the Min­istry of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing con­tin­ues to be im­pressed by what her com­pa­ny does.

“They are blown away by what we’ve built and the amount of em­ploy­ment we’ve been able to cre­ate so far with­out hav­ing much sup­port. I mean, we’re just build­ing this in the pri­vate sec­tor on our own. But to have that part­ner­ship with the Gov­ern­ment and be able to help with the place­ment, al­so helps.”

Al­so, the com­pa­ny has com­plet­ed a Work­place Pol­i­cy on HIV and AIDS and will be sign­ing a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MoU) with the Min­istry of Labour on No­vem­ber 26, 2025 in or­der to for­malise the im­ple­men­ta­tion and pro­gramme de­vel­op­ment of that pol­i­cy.

Vibe Con­nec­tions will be the first ful­ly vir­tu­al (on­line) com­pa­ny in T&T to so do, she said.

Evolv­ing world of work

Blake-Fore­man ex­plained the mod­ern vir­tu­al world of work.

“You are in my of­fice right now. If I look at my Zoom room, we have 48 peo­ple on this Zoom link at this mo­ment work­ing. When I’m ready to go speak to my mar­ket­ing per­son, I go over to my mar­ket­ing room.

“When I need to speak to my sales team or my back-end op­er­a­tions, they’re all in dif­fer­ent rooms. We have vir­tu­al em­ploy­ees and clients meet­ing here right on this. When they need to meet and talk or dis­cuss any­thing, they come right on here, this is our of­fice.”

She spoke about how com­pa­nies and em­ploy­ees ben­e­fit from the shift that is hap­pen­ing in the world of work from a tra­di­tion­al brick-and-mor­tar work­place to work­ing vir­tu­al­ly.

“Com­pa­nies have re­alised the ben­e­fit of vir­tu­al em­ploy­ment be­cause in the US it means that there is less re­al es­tate space that they need to ac­quire, less rent or more rent if they need to pay in or­der to house all of their em­ploy­ees. So, there are ben­e­fits.”

She al­so gave ex­am­ples of more ben­e­fits like high­er lev­el pro­duc­tiv­i­ty lev­els.

“Sta­tis­tics show links to an in­creased lev­el of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty with re­mote work be­cause there’s less wa­ter cool­er con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pen. You know peo­ple in their nat­ur­al and their per­son­al en­vi­ron­ment tend to have a cer­tain lev­el of com­fort and fo­cus be­cause they can cre­ate that space to suit their per­son­al needs as far as what would make them pro­duc­tive.”

She spoke about how com­pet­i­tive the world of work is now.

“One of the oth­er great things is just how mul­ti­fac­eted our tal­ent pool is. Be­cause we are now the pri­ma­ry source for vir­tu­al em­ploy­ment, you find that peo­ple that are on our bench, and es­pe­cial­ly with the cur­rent rise in un­em­ploy­ment that we’re ex­pe­ri­enc­ing in T&T.”

She not­ed there are job speak­ers from every imag­in­able back­ground that re­quest their place­ment ser­vices.

“I have a doc­tor that’s on our bench right now, which breaks my heart and that mo­ti­vates me to be on the look­out. We have en­gi­neers, we have ac­coun­tants that we’ve been able to get placed who have ed­u­ca­tion, have work ex­pe­ri­ence, but can­not find jobs, and we’ve been able to get them em­ploy­ment.”

Giv­en their suc­cess in match­ing job seek­ers with vir­tu­al jobs, she states that in the com­ing weeks and by ear­ly 2026, Vibe Con­nec­tions plans to ex­pand its clien­tele be­yond the US to en­gage T&T’s di­verse pri­vate sec­tor.

“We’re build­ing a ded­i­cat­ed team to serve lo­cal busi­ness­es and help them at­tract top tal­ent in vir­tu­al as well as tra­di­tion­al job roles. This is an area we al­ready ex­cel in and there are clear­ly some vi­able op­por­tu­ni­ties which lie ahead.”