Career Development For Women Of Color by The Memo

Virtual career development and progress dashboards for women of color to prepare for their seat at the leadership table. 

Women of color are some of the most educated women in the country, yet their achievements aren't reflected in senior level positions (only 4.5% of executive seats in America are held by women of color), salaries, or seats on corporate boards.

Women of color experience systemic challenges that have kept them from access to the best opportunities in the workplace. Many of the top companies recruit women of color, but they don’t always do a great job of retaining and advancing them within the company. 

The Memo exists to help close these gaps for women of color -- to be the advocate they need to address their unique challenges. We provide both curriculum and community via virtual career boot camps. Here, women of color can learn essential skills to navigate their entire career cycle. At each boot camp, we bring successful female managers and execs for an intimate experience with opportunities for education, mentorship, and access on topics like salary negotiation, career transitioning, and business etiquette.

Through career development boot camps, and a new online dashboard, we want to track how women of color are moving forward in their careers. We believe that if women of color have targeted professional resources that they can share with their employers, they might have additional opportunities to move forward in their career. 

We will track the participation and progress on our platform to capture where these women are working, as well as their tenure, retention, and if they are advancing within their companies. We believe now is the time to hold employers accountable for true equity inside companies for their women of color. With our dashboard tracking system, we will be able to produce data to help identify those companies that are the most invested in women of color as part of their workforce.

Since people of color will be the majority of the American workplace by 2060, it’s vital that we start investing in the next generation of our workforce.

Career coaching and development for women is a growing industry, with the advent of books like Lean In; however most popular career development spaces use a one size fits all solution, and are mostly geared towards white women. Women of color face different challenges at work. While neither virtual courses nor dashboards are new concepts, we believe that applying them specifically towards women of color, and using dashboards to track progress and hold companies accountable for their specific efforts in retaining diverse talent is something that’s not being done effectively yet.

In addition to reaching and training women via virtual career boot camps, we want to utilize interactive dashboards to track the progress of a hired woman of color starting on day one. Our technology would identify her needs through intake surveys, aptitude tests, and track her development over time at her company and other companies she moves to. These data points are crucial to moving closer to equity for women of color at work. Companies are not being held accountable for their dismal diversity and equity numbers. Eventually this tool can be used to track other underrepresented groups.

Over the next 12 months, our goals are to: 

• Add more members to our team, specifically developers who can enhance our dashboards.
• Cultivate partnerships with corporations seeking to enhance diversity and inclusion in their businesses, as well as those looking to pilot our dashboard solution.

We currently work with individual women to track their progress. We would like to expand its reach within companies and non profits. We believe having access to resources to build out a robust dashboard solution will help us scale.

Ultimately, our solution will help companies around the world stay accountable. By having a curated career path and tracking tool, we would be able to see which companies are passing or failing in terms of diversity, retention, and advancement and become the gold standard in identifying the best places for women of color to work. 

Our customers currently find our products via our website and social media channels, and the virtual career boot camps (and other events) are deployed via existing webinar software. We stay in contact with our customers via our weekly email newsletters and social media. The employee dashboards can be accessed on a desktop or a mobile app.

We would like to serve five companies over the next 12 months. And in three years would will like to serve 25 companies. Currently women of color make up less than five percent of executive roles at Fortune 500 companies, with dedicated solutions to identify and advance women of color, companies (and the women that work there) will be able to make more data driven decisions around moving their women up the leadership pipeline. We look forward to creating impact in the next three years to set the trajectory for the future generations of women of color in the workforce.

Our team has experience in development and sales, as well as backgrounds in higher education, fundraising, finance, and management. One of the skills that has allowed us to have success thus far is the ability to create and cultivate relationships with other experts in this space, which we are hoping to be able to do with others in the Solve community.

We have a monthly subscription service for women of color to gain unlimited access to our tools (in addition to a virtual career boot camps, our company also offers a monthly speaker series, and coaching calls). Companies also pay subscription fees for access to training and retention tools for the women of color in their departments, including the career dashboard.

We believe that being part of the Solve community would allow The Memo to solve an equity problem first in the United States and secondly on a global scale. The work we do at The Memo is important, but we need help with access to new relationships, resources, and guidance to help us make a long lasting impact for women of color in the workplace. There aren’t many organizations focused on helping working women of color advance, although the US will skew towards women of color in the coming years. We are working to get ahead of the problem. 

Being part of Solve would help create key partnerships with companies who are committed to diversity and equity in their workplaces. While we have seen success to to date, we believe that being a part of Solve would help to gain access to possible collaborations to help create and manage the infrastructure of our dashboard and data.