All right, ladies, thank you for joining me. Um My name is Ashley Austin. I'll do a bio and an introduction later today, but thank you for spending a little bit of time with me.Please feel free to drop any questions you have in the chat or if you have any audio or video issues I tested prior to the session. So we should be good. Um Today, we're gonna talk about the three CS with Cordera consulting, culture and career growth and what does that mean? And along the way, I'll Sprinkle a little bit about myself and kind of what consulting means for me. So who is CC is a global boutique consulting firm that helps leading brands unlock extraordinary results. We do this in four areas, strategy, innovation, technology, and data. Many of our projects span multiple these domains. I'll hit on that a little bit later. Um But there are occasions when a client wants, for example, a data warehouse that's easy to do. But the challenge is always the why the organization should be saying I have the following objectives, visions, et cetera. How do I get there instead of leading with technology? We like to lead with strategy and vision. We work with multiple brands across various industries. You'll see some logos here. Um You can go to our website. We have some really cool glass spotlights.

Um Chili's for one is one of our, one of our coolest spotlights that I enjoy. Um The firm was established in 1999 and we have over 1800 employees globally. And so you can see on the right hand bottom of our map where we are are located geographically. So I talked earlier about spanning across domains. So our cap our tech our capability is across, we focus in three capabilities, management, consulting experience, design, and technology solutions, which offers several opportunities for career growth and the ability to provide clients with an end to end solution.

It's a unique opportunity to offer a client, a great strategy and roadmap but also provide a team that can implement this work. Oftentimes the same team that created the strategy completes the implementation work. This is a key advantage in career growth. As a team member is exposed to the full business development life cycle. It's al it also helps rule realistic project expectations and less of overs selling the work. Our firm has three practices within multiple capabilities. I focus within the technology solution but often projects I work on include multiple capabilities. For example, a client may have a goal to drive better customer engagement via their mobile app. You have the obvious mobile development which will be in our technology solutions.

Then the next question is gonna be what data is needed for that app. So then you may bring in some data science and data engineering skill sets, you build a great product, but how does the customer interact with their product? Now, we may cross into our experience, design domain more about the look, the feel and the usability. But even prior to that, we may actually go through development where there may be many cycles, instruction innovations, which is offered by our management consulting firm. Oh, sorry about that.

And so that's who we are kind of talking about what we do um from a culture standpoint. Uh we have five core values and I recently celebrated my 10 year anniversary with the firm. When I started the company, I had some prior experience with a larger firm and I kinda had an exit strategy for years because I was kind of burnt out on always traveling, you know, working 56 hours a week. But here my here I am 10 years later and I'm here because of our five core values, humility, excellence, integrity, tenacity, and people. First, these values extend beyond my working hours, especially humility. I was raised to have humility, but I learned how to demonstrate it by working at this firm humility. In every decision, we consider our clients and colleagues interests are more important than our own. When we are wrong, we own. Our part, ask for forgiveness and work to rebuild confidence and trust. Working with leaders has demonstrate the ability to ask for forgiveness and work to rebuild confidence and trust has been a great example which has allowed me to model these attributes not only in my professional, but also in my personal life.

I'm very grateful for learning how to live humility and not just be one, we talk about our culture. Um We have some awards and we are extremely honored to be recognized both nationally and regionally by our culture analyst, like for fortune, et cetera. It's a reflection of the caliber of our people. This is another reason why I'm here. Um You have the opportunity to really shape the firm and be a part of success. One of the main reasons we continue to be recognized is the intentional and continuous efforts in diversity, equity and inclusion. We focus on recruiting, retention, strategy, marketing, learning and development. CRE creates a welcoming and safe environment that encourages people from every nation, race, ethnicity, belief, gender, sexual identity, disability and culture to feel respected and valued. I would like to highlight our goal for 2023 for 30% senior level female and senior level black and Latinx representation at the firm. This is a big goal, but I think it's achievable. You can help us achieve this goal while finding a great place to work. I'll talk a little bit about how you can help us get there later. One of the other unique things we have is we try to live by our values, not only externally with our clients, but also internally with ourselves as well.

So it's one thing to have great culture and value and present something to the world. But it's another thing to be able also to have that for your employees. We place a strong emphasis on our people and make intentional efforts and intentional networks to support, to make sure we're sharing the su success of all the work here. Some examples are our DN I team for women's network, open pride and create color. Um What that means to me personally, I'm highly involved with women in technology last year. Um Doing uh open pride. I took a lot of opportunities to learn more about different cultures, beliefs and values focused on several um open proprietary events, learning the history and how I can just be an ally for the community. Um My er GS provide opportunities for support, growth and learning. This is one area I've watched mature over the last 10 years and it keeps me excited even more. All of these groups are led by employers which provide various opportunities and types of engagements at the firm outside of your normal day to day client work. We also like to give back to our community. Um We invest heavily um what we have offer their community impact K for entry arm focused on positively impacting the communities in which we live and work.

We strive to make an impact on people who are circumstantially blocked from reaching their full potential, how we serve. We do an annual service day um every day, once a year for one, sorry about that. One day out of the year, everyone across the firm has the opportunity to participate in multiple events. Um This one came full circle for me. This year, I participated in Girls Inc. We spent the day at the Girls Inc Organization which their um their goal is to help young ladies get into stem uh science, technology, engineering and math and support them through middle school. And through high school recently, um through our non profit consulting leadership program, NT LP which allows consultants with a passion for community service to volunteer their time and talents. Um Recently, Girls Inc was selected to be our NCOP for our Houston go. So it kind of came full circle for me. I I had the opportunity to support them for service day. But also now I'm acting as a leader and a mentor for a group of six consultants who are spending some of their um time volunteering to participate and help Girls Inc um on one of their key initiatives over the next few years.

And then we also have employee driven service events. This is more of our grassroots. So um I think it's been about three or four years ago. Maybe a little bit longer. Um I organized a toy drive so I set up an Amazon wishlist kind of send it out to the firm. And all the toys that were um donated was benefited for uh kids in the care of CPS in the Greater Houston area. So that was a passion of something of mine that I've continued to donate time to and it was a good way to get others involved, Um that were not in our Houston jail at the time, most of our people were in Dallas, but they all, a lot of people did contribute. It was a successful toy drive just a little bit about kind of what we do as a firm. Um A lot of people want to know what is it like working for c what is it like being a consultant? So I'll tell you a little bit about me personally and kind of what my journey has been. As I mentioned earlier, I've been with the firm for over 10 years prior to joining. I was at the largest consulting firm kind of told you I got out of that, kinda wanted to do something different with a smaller firm.

Um from my first job out of college at MD Anderson until now the work I've enjoyed and focused on most has always been data. I've had the opportunity to work with Fortune 500 companies to smaller nonprofits such as Girls Inc, as I mentioned earlier. And KSBJ, which is a local radio station in Houston. Um within consulting, I've had the opportunity to learn and work in various industries including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, um A couple of representative logos here. HBO Max T DCU which is a credit union local to Texas. Um K 89.3 KSBJ which is a Christian radio station in Sally Beauty, which is pretty cool because I shop there. So um it was a good experience for me. Um My focus has always been data. Data is a fabric to everyday lives. Mobile phones allow us to produce data constantly and every company has data. Um We've heard the term data is the new all of data rich. But how should a company utilize that data? I love the challenge of helping companies harness the power of data to drive better business. So in a nutshell for the last 10 to 13 years, everything I've done has been data focused. Um So I've had the opportunity to, to design systems, do data integrations, data migrations.

Um Some of the newer terms used now, data engineering, data pipelines. So that's always been my focus and I've enjoyed being able to implement that across multiple industries. Um On a personal note, um I love cooking classic cars and almost anything active. Um I have a large family, so I'm typically hanging out with the kiddos. I think at last count, I had 18 nieces, nieces and nephews, I haven't counted in three years. I think we have a new addition since then. So we may be up to 19, but it's always a good time when we're hanging out. So it's a little bit about me. Um Some of the work I've had the opportunity to do with crea, I pulled two case studies that I thought were really interesting. Um We collaborated with leading entertainment providers, more tech and marketing analytics team to enable international marketing attribution reporting across the full from customer journey. What does that really mean? Provide the client the ability to understand how effective their way and mobile marketing efforts were the ultimate goal is to drive subscription rate. How effective are our marketing dollars at this? So you spend a lot of money on marketing, how do you get there? So this was one of those that crossed multiple domains as well. We had some data engineering, we had some people from data science, management consulting and software engineering.

In the end, we was able to create a platform that allowed them to answer the question and understand how marketing was driving subscriptions and understand where and how they should spend their marketing dollars across multiple platforms. Facebook, uh tiktok, um Instagram, that was the other large one we did some work with. So that was a cool one. Um I was able to work with them about two years. We were able to have a pretty large team about 8 to 10 consultants. And we were able to allow consultants to play different roles, whether it was front end visualization, doing business analysis work in other other areas that they found. So we were able to shuffle the team around. So everyone got a good experience. Career growth is always important for me.

Another fun client. I had a chance to work for zinc's health. Um We partner with Zinc Health to design and implement a new product that enabled increased adaptability and accuracy for Zinc's clients. Um It was to build a new product that allowed for patient and clinical operation input.

So think about data. As I told you, everything I do is around data and understand how effective patient care is along with things that could be implemented for preventative care. So from a technology, you know, we did a full suite of Aws services, we were able to do kind of what we call predictive analytics, what could have happened or what should have happened to a patient's care. So I really um was passionate about this one. I love working in the healthcare industry in the healthcare space. Um primarily because I I just understand the value of data and how technology can influence a person's visit to the hospital. Um My first you know, medical or health care, it was before ee billing and e medical records. So I kind of see it come from everything paper to now being driven by data and analytics. Um That's been an interesting journey and I've had the opportunity to work with multiple clients, both healthcare and pharmaceutical for that. Um So I mentioned earlier that you can help us get to our 2023 goal and here's how we are hiring. And so I talk a little bit about our hiring process. Um campus level, we're hiring across G OS with some expectations. We do our, you know, normal fall and spring is when we do our recruiting kind of fall into normal um Collegiate cycles.

We have Dallas Houston, Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and San Francisco. We're typically hiring campus level in all offices. Some opportunities may be limited only because some of our offices are newer and we wanna make sure we put all our um campus hires in a position where they have leadership and enough support to grow their career early in the first two years, which is really important outside of campus level.

This is for experience and campus level hiring. We offer a flexible connection model and that's kind of implemented in a couple of different ways. You're, you're assigned to one of our offices, so you're assigned to a go. So you have a community there. You can choose to travel for work or opt not to travel, you know, it's optional based on the project. But we also, we always consider where a person is in the journey of their life not everyone can travel. There was a time where I didn't and could not travel for two years. Um And I had no issues with that with the firm. I was able to continue to progress my career and work on challenging projects. And then also in our flexible connection model, you have the ability within your team to define your working model. So that kind of sets the standard for what time you're gonna be online, normal working hours, 930 to 430 because we have people in different time zones um as well as if there's any established in in person meetings that you may be required for or not required for things that you have video on, on, you know, client interaction meetings or stand ups or daily.

So some of those things are set at the project level and it's collaborative, it's not a one size fits all. So we'll move over to our full time positions, our experienced hires um on our technology solutions, we're hiring kind of across the board in our locations. So senior data engineers, cloud architects, senior mobile software developers, software engineering and also for our experience design, I think UX um senior front end developers for all locations, management consultant is gonna be in Houston and Chicago. Um If that sounds like gibberish or you're not sure where you would fit, but you still have an interest in consulting and helping us reach out 2023 goals. I believe I posted my notes um in, in, I posted my linkedin in the comments, but you can scan one or three of these QR codes and it take you to more opportunities or you can interact. I think we have someone managing the booth daily. So if you have some specific questions, you can send them a note or you can post any questions that you have um in the chat right now. I talk kind of fast. So I think I finished up early. Um, let me read through the chats and see, I know Rio was managing some of these for me. Give me a second. Um How about an early career for career changers? Um I do not wanna butcher your name. So I apo apologize for your Donna.

Um So we do have some people that have switched careers and came into the firm. I think each situation is unique. Um So we've had some people that were um interviewed a couple of gentlemen that was in the Navy for years. Did some other things decided to take? Um It's one of these new co colleges where it's like six months, kind of a boot camp coding degree that you can get. And then with those skill sets, they were able to transition and come into the firm. So it's kind of unique if you want. Um If you want some advice about your specific situation, send me a message and link in linkedin and I'll respond to that to see if you can help. Um The problem is visa sponsorship. Uh Hopefully r answered that one because I'm not sure um sponsorship one. I'm not sure. I know historically, we did not offer it, but I know there are some different conversations where there may be some limited sponsorships available, but we can get you more details if you, if you reach out to us on that one. Um Let me drop my linkedin again. Let me know if you guys are able to get to my page. Um So where do early get grads roll enroll for May 23 2023 opening up? So if you grad, so that means you graduate in the spring of May 2020 23. So we'll be doing our campus recruiting in the fall, which is normally heavily around September and October. Um So it depends on what campus you are at.

We do recruit in-person granted COVID exceptions at several campuses. Um But what you can do is you can scan the QR code depending on which area you have. And typically what it will take you to is an interest form and you can fill out that and that will allow us to send you communications as our um in as our um campus recruiting starts up or just send me a note and we can reach out to you if you send me a note with your email saying, hey, I'm interested for May 2023.

Send me a note and I can forward it to the right person and get you on that email distribution list. All righty looks like we don't have any other questions at the moment. I apologize. I talk fast. I was trying to time this to only have five minutes of, of dead silence. So I apologize for that, but I can always make up a fun story for the next I think what five minutes, let me see how much, how long this was scheduled for. So we have 10 minutes. Ria any suggestions, what to do with the next next 10 minutes? Ah What was your most challenging project? Um I can look at that as in two ways. Actually, zinc was pro zinc's was probably one of my more challenging projects. I highlighted them earlier. It was challenging because our client and sponsor um he was very passionate about what he was building. Um And his communication skills wasn't the greatest, but I put it as a project that I actually loved and enjoyed because um the work that we were doing I felt really passionate about and I knew it could help people as well as that. It was an opportunity to build something from Greenfield or from scratch from beginning to end using all Aws services minus Tableau. So I would say zinc was probably one of my challenging projects. Um Yeah, I think that's probably been one of my most challenging projects lately.

Um I think on a project itself um as a principal architect in this firm, what's the most challenging for me at this point is probably more about how do I make sure my team members have the ability to grow, learn, meet their career goals. But also we still hold a high level of delivery and execution for the client. So there's always a balance between you have, you know, person a wanting to go do and experience XY and Z. Um But trying to figure out how to shape that frame within what the client expectations are for. Uh Let's see, we got a question. I have worked as a teacher for 17 years. I had a training on salesforce and got a sales for admin. What's your advice for interviews for a person who had a different career? Um It's a great question. One, I tell people to just be honest. Uh Two, I would say, you know, be able to show a body of work even if it's small, right? Like, hey, you know, here's some real life or real world experiences and things. I've done some projects that I've created. I know sales force is a little bit different, but I'll give you an example. I hope this kind of connects the dots for you. Um We've had people that want to switch careers or new to coding and if you're familiar, a lot of people check their code or projects and to github.

Um So in that, in that case, we, you know, we asked them like, hey, we're gonna pull your code down, see if it works, if it or if it runs. So that's one example. Um I think in your case, it's just being honest, um and just being able to speak to what you have done and what you're willing to learn. And I think most times, you know, some employees are, are willing to make this switch and give you the opportunity to do that. Um Can you speak to experience a new hire regarding training, staffing on projects and opportunities for technical developments? Um So it's two phases to that.

So we'll talk about campus hires versus experienced hires. Campus hires. You come through a full process where you have credit U which is maybe a week or two weeks of training. Um and then you're assigned to what we have as our technology core. So you think of that as a about an 18 month where you have a rotation or undeclared major. And so the previous slide, we had all our capabilities that gives you the opportunity to work across multiple capabilities. Because what we find is students come in, it's like, hey, I wanna be a mobile developer but then they end up doing um front end work, just user design or data work. And that's where their passion is. So that gives you the opportunity to grow in a safe space and not be pigeonholed. And there's also some technical training that we've developed in house to allow you to go do that um to learn and grow some skills. And then also we have um a learning and development. I'm trying to think what's the right? We have a learning and development domain. So we have what we call TT O or uh training time off. So you can go seek certifications, read a book, attend a conference that's on experience and campus hire side. So campus hires, they come in through a, a rotational program. They have a one or two week kind of credit.

You kinda learning the way, you know that gap between a campus hire to a full time college students. Um kind of where things intersect is once you get staffed on a project and kind of your, your shepherding and your career at the firm is everyone is assigned a career coach. You have a former career coach. The requirements are you meet once a month, I'm a career coach to 5 to 7 people right now. And my ultimate goal is to check in, check in with them at least once a month to understand how they're doing personally and professionally because those two things um are intertwined for me. Um but also understand like, what are their future goals? Are they on the right part project? Are they seeking the right technical training and certifications and all those things? So, we kind of try to combine multiple things on that. Um And so you had the opportunity to have someone kind of guide you throughout your time at the firm. Um That's kind of how that uh how, how it works from being on boarded into the firm.

There are some details I left out, it's kind of boring a lot of paperwork and stuff like that. Um Staffing on projects, technical development. I'm just rereading the question. Um Staffing on projects I think is more of an art than a science, but we have individuals that's dedicated to understanding what your career goals are. So I have a team member that has aspirations and I got an email yesterday where they said, hey, Ashley, we want to extend this person for another three months on this project. Let's have a conversation to understand if this is gonna be the best fit for her and what you think her career goals are. So it's always fluid and dynamic. We try not to staff people and they have no expectations or understanding. I feel like they're just getting put on roles that doesn't help their career growth. I can't talk today. Um Looks like advice for someone wanting to build a career, what has worked for you to progress and grow and care. Um What has worked for me, which is interesting because this is a global women's conference. I've had allies throughout my entire career. Um And I and I was blessed because all of them were males. My first, you know, female boss, it did not go well at all.

I don't know. I was young, I'll take the blame for that. Um But since then, all my, my bosses and mentors for the most part have been men and they've helped shepherd and grow my career um across the last 13 or 14 years. The one thing I say what's been important is just investing in yourself if you're at a place right now where you wanna go take training and do all these other things and say your company doesn't reimburse you for it. The best investment is gonna be in yourself. So I would say, hey, spend the money if you haven't to go take the training or find something free on youtube, you just gotta kinda invest in yourself. Um because technology continues to change, I reinvented myself a few times just based on what the world was when I started to what it is now. Um Are there any technical requirements for a management consulting position? Uh No, there's not, there are requirements for our MC position, but that is what we like to cook. What I like to say. Don't repeat this. I might get in trouble. It's our non technical side. So for, there is a, there is a component where a lot of times you're helping manage um strategy, et cetera for technology projects. So having a good understanding of common technologies and common platforms is a, is a plus, it's not necessarily a requirement.

So when we think about a software developer, we expect them to know Python a job, et cetera. On the management consultant side, we don't expect you to know how to code and do those things. But we under we expect you to have a, a general understanding of technology. Um specifically some of the ones we use and how you can relate that to a project. Um Share a little bit about our interview process. Um All right, I got two minutes. Um So our interview process depending on where you're coming in, but what you can expect is um hopefully a conversation and it's a conversation with a few different people. We try to understand your behavior. So one, you know, is c a good fit for you and are you a good fit for us? So, going back to our culture and value skill, um culture and value slide and then we have what we consider like our craft interview and depending on if that's management consulting on the technology side, those vary. Um And then it also depends on what level you're coming in.

So we'll do a craft interview just to understand kind of what your skill sets are. Is it something that we can apply um or transfer to some of the projects that we do now and then I think it's typically two, maybe three interviews. Um It used to be a long process. Now, you know, we have enough people in the market demands. We, we can get you through an interview process fairly quickly. Just kind of based on timing in your comfort zone. We've had people say, hey, I'm, I'm very interested, but I need to get through these next six weeks. So we can kind of slowly walk them through our process that we have some people that like, hey, I need to get out of my current firm or current job. I really wanna do something else. So we'll try to, we'll try to fast track those. So it just kind of depends on where you're at. Um I think I hit all the questions and we're right at 310. So thank you ladies for joining. Um This is, this is actually my first presentation at a conference. I was a little bit nervous, but hopefully, um this is beneficial to everyone. Please send me a note on linkedin. If you have any questions, you can reach out and scan one of the QR codes and I really appreciate your time. Thank you.