Creating Pathways

You mentioned just now the importance of infrastructure and equality. And those are really hot topics right now. And you’re in an industry that maybe, you know, you’ve got young women coming out of college. How do you make infrastructure, transportation be glamorous and get women involved and other diverse workers? I mean, do you have any advice that you can share that’s worked for you?

Well, first piece of advice is we really do have to understand that in order to accomplish our objectives, we have to have the full support of the whole talent pool. There are a lot of people who’ve said, “Hey, you’re working in these fields like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering that have been male dominated and there’s no pipeline.”
And what I’m hoping to find is that that’s hogwash, that there are obviously, you know, women interested in these fields. They haven’t been invited in appropriately. And so, what we’re trying to do is use every muscle we’ve got. We’ve got parts of our organization that reach out into K through 12 education. That’s fantastic. You know, get young people interested in these fields. We’ve got a Siemens Foundation that’s working on reaching communities who have never known that opportunities like ours would be accessible to them.
So, working with organizations, building apprenticeship models so that high school students can get interested in the kind of work we and our customers do. And for them to grow into these careers. But what’s been most fun for me to watch is the transformation of our people and organization experts, the people who’ve been recruiting the talent into our organization experts, the people who’ve been developing our leaders. What they have challenged themselves to do is to begin to meet talent where they are. Instead of looking in the classic places like, okay, what is the graduating class of the School of Engineering look like?

Right.

Asking ourselves, well, are there other pathways? And how do we find those communities? So, partnering with Boss Maker or Fairy God Boss, women’s networks where we can reach pools of talent that were unknown to us previously. That’s been a game changer. Working with our Black Professionals Network, ERG, to reach out into the HBCU community and tap into the excitement that the HBCU community has for purpose and service. It turns out we’re a natural career path for minority candidates who want to join us. So all of these things are underway. And I really am excited about what the future holds.