Helping people reach their potential has been a life-long mission of Sharon Sinnott.

 

            After being laid off from her high school teaching position over 30 years ago in Hull, MA, Sharon started her own consulting company, SLM Training and Consulting, while teaching part-time as a lecturer at two local colleges.   Soon, her love of teaching and her great success in helping people find jobs led Sharon to open an additional business, Placements Plus.  Teaching business skills and placing people in rewarding careers became her passion. More importantly, Sharon had a burning question “How do people without money receive a post-high school education?”

 

            This was the start of Sharon’s third business, Sinnott School. Sharon’s goal was to create a non-profit school for the economically disadvantaged where students could go to school for free.  Students would learn entry-level computer skills, and receive guidance in how to market themselves to employers and thereby find satisfying careers in the workforce.   Leveraging state and federal grants, Sinnott School enabled hundreds of public-assistance and low-income persons, many of whom were young mothers who had not completed high school, to attend her programs for free and to secure well-paying jobs that transformed their lives.

 

            As computer technology began changing the workplace, Sharon seized the opportunity to seek and obtain grants from emerging computer companies. Recognizing Sharon’s track record of success, IBM selected Sinnott School as the recipient of a grant which donated computers for each classroom. This partnership proved highly-successful, as IBM and Sinnott School were able to effectively reach yet another cohort of workers dealing with a competitive and dynamic technological business environment. For a quarter-century, Sinnott School was the vehicle by which countless careers were launched or enhanced.

​

            For Sharon, teaching is a privilege which she embraces.  For her students, education is a revelation of their talents and a vehicle for success.  In 1997, her children’s K-8 school was experiencing great challenges.  The school’s board asked her to serve as principal.  When Sharon left the elementary school, six years later to become a full-time college teacher, it was in a fundamentally-better place, with a significantly-larger enrollment, higher test scores, and a culture of achievement shared by the entire school community.

 

            Currently, as a college educator, Sharon has continued to transform lives by empowering students to recognize their inherent talents and achieve their goals.  Her students have used the communicative tools which Sharon has taught them, and the poise and confidence developed through them, to achieve great success in their personal and professional ventures.  Sharon has some advice to offer all who seek success: “You must be passionate and love what you do.  If you lose sight of that mission, you will not succeed.”

 

           Sharon is a firm believer in a self-fulfilling prophecy. She says to “watch what you say, and always be positive.  If you say you can’t do something, you are right, you can’t. If you speak negatively, the result will be negative.” Her mantra of “P.M.A.”, positive mental attitude, was practiced every day at Sinnott School and became a common theme among all Sinnott School graduates.  

 

          Just as Sharon long-ago recognized and addressed the financial obstacles confronting economically-challenged populations seeking to acquire the skills to enter the business workforce, Sharon’s decades of creating effective communicators at the college level, and the feedback which those graduates have provided about their ill-prepared contemporaries, has identified a difficult truth:  “College graduates are going into the workplace with cutting-edge skills and innovative attitudes only to discover that many otherwise-capable professionals are lacking effective communication, management, and leadership skills.  College professors need to get out of the classroom and into the boardroom to provide continuous learning for a mixed generation of workers at an affordable fee.” This recognition of a fundamental—but solvable—void in professional skill-sets sparked the creation of Sinnott Communication Associates, d.b.a. SinnComm. SinnComm’s mission is to define and refine confident, credible and effective communication skills for entrepreneurs and corporate professionals coached by accomplished educators in the field of communication.

 

SinnComm looks forward to partnering with you

in order to achieve this transformative goal.