GE partners with sorority to grow women techies
Leadership DELTA program gives students a year of training and mentorship
Every year since 2002 Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc (DST) has offered selected members an opportunity to learn from some of the most talented African American women in the country. The vehicle is a mentoring program called Leadership DELTA (Defining Emerging Leaders Through Advocacy).
The program is sponsored and managed jointly by General Electric (GE, Fairfield, CT) and the African American sorority.
The year-long experience matches collegiate DST members
with executive female mentors who provide the students
with insight on how to become leaders in their communities
and chosen fields.
“My experience was phenomenal and my relationship with my mentor is unparalleled,” says Khia Moses, a 2005 graduate of Leadership DELTA and current co-chair of the program for GE.
“I was mentored by Dee Wood, a woman who has been instrumental in building the careers of many prominent
African American women at GE and elsewhere.”
Gwendolyn Boyd, DST’s twenty-second national president, and the first technical professional to lead the sorority, created Leadership DELTA in 2002 to “coach, mentor and develop young African American women.” Boyd herself is a ChE. The program is geared towards engineering and technology students, but not all the mentors or program participants are technical. In addition to technical and business professionals, mentors have included doctors, lawyers and educators.
Although the Leadership DELTA website lists eligible majors as math, science, engineering and technology, computer science and business, the program does consider serious candidates from other fields. Applicants are asked to submit two letters of recommendation, a statement of purpose and a resume. They must be active members of the sorority and also demonstrate the values that black Greek letter organizations (BGLOs) are known for: scholarship, a commitment to community service and leadership. Most BGLOs were organized in the early 1900s to develop unity among collegiate African Americans and offer career opportunities not easily available at the time.
Activities and leadership
Throughout the year Leadership DELTA participants facilitate workshops, engage in challenging career-building exercises and meet regularly with their mentors, many of whom are GE employees. They learn practical skills like job interviewing and augment knowledge about their field of study.
Moses and co-chair Khristie Dyson, a graduate of the inaugural year of the program, agreed to take on the responsibility of managing the program because they wanted other rising tech professionals to benefit from the extraordinary opportunity they had. Heading the program is a volunteer effort that both women do in addition to their day jobs.
“It’s an awesome program. I was so passionate about it as a participant that I wanted to stay involved and see it grow,” says Dyson. Six years later Dyson is still in regular contact with her mentor, GE Executive Dot Harris.
Many Leadership DELTA participants come from families that don’t have a lot of experience in corporate America, Dyson and Moses note. “My parents graduated from college much later in life, so I am a first generation traditional college graduate. Programs like this were key to my professional development,” says Moses. She earned her BSEE from Kettering University (Flint, MI) in 2005.
Dyson grew up in Louisiana and graduated from Southern University and A&M College (Baton Rouge, LA), also with a BSEE, in December 2002. She describes her family as entrepreneurial. Both her parents have owned businesses but never attended traditional four-year colleges. Leadership DELTA taught her things like etiquette, professional dress, networking skills, even how to fill out benefit forms and start a retirement plan.
Today, Moses is a power nozzle cell leader at the Cincinnati Service Center of GE Energy Services, where she’s the strategic and operational leader for the manufacturing repair cell. Dyson is a product planner at a GE Power electricity meter factory in New Hampshire. She manages product line information and processes for GE employees and customers.
GE benefits from sponsorship
Delta Sigma Theta has more than 200,000 members and chapters in nine countries, which makes its Leadership DELTA program a rich pool from which to recruit aspiring diverse female techies. It’s indeed a worthwhile investment for GE, says Deborah Elam, vice president and chief diversity officer.
GE has nearly 500 BGLO members working with the company, from Delta Sigma Theta and other organizations. Elam emphasizes that Leadership DELTA is about more than just writing a sponsorship check. GE’s hands-on involvement, she says, has been a big factor in the program’s success.
“When we started this we had a goal to help the organization develop leaders and strengthen our company pipeline for African American women and other minorities,” she says. “The women we have hired through the program have done extremely well.”
Leadership DELTA graduates are often offered internships and positions at GE, but not all choose this path. “We never envisioned that people could join Leadership DELTA only if they planned on coming to GE. Of course we’d like to hire more than our ‘fair share’ of program graduates, but we recognize that some go on to graduate school or other businesses,” says Elam. “In my role I have to look at the big picture, which is that 98 percent of participants will be GE customers of some sort, so clearly we want them to have a good view of our company whether or not they join us after college.”
Elam would like to see this type of program expand to other African American sororities as well as African American fraternities.
Program grows as mentors return
The number of Leadership DELTA participants has doubled since Boyd started the program. Forty students were accepted last year and even more growth is expected in the future.
Having enough of the right mentors is key to determining how many students can be accommodated, but that hasn’t been a problem so far. Moses says there are nearly 100 Deltas at GE alone who are “ready, willing and able” to mentor. They too are inspired by the program.
“The mentors have such great experiences that they often want to come back and mentor the next class,” Moses says.
“Some of our mentors have been featured in popular women’s magazines,” Dyson adds. Last year, for instance, the program was mentioned in an Essence feature about the twenty-five best places for African American women to work. GE was number eight on the list and among its touted pluses was its sponsorship of Leadership DELTA.
The program year starts with an annual leadership conference, where participants meet each other, attend workshops and network with a wide range of GE and other corporate leaders. Each year’s class ends with a graduation ceremony at the sorority’s national convention or one of its regional conferences, where participants reconnect with each other and
GE officials.
“It’s very emotional because we’re so grateful for the experience,” says Dyson. “The participants never expected to be in a room with so many women who are trailblazers in their careers and in the sorority, and are willing to spend three or four days talking with them about important things like networking and, of course, the realities of corporate America for African American women.”
http://www.diversitycareers.com/arti...s_GE_Delta.htm
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