Hello. I'm gonna go ahead and start. I've got 1130. Um I think we've got a small group. Can you all hear me if someone could put in the chat to make sure they could hear me? Wonderful. Thank you.So, hello and welcome to my session on stem reentry programs. Uh My name is Jennifer Howland and I'm the managing director at I relaunch and you probably have not heard of I relaunch before, but it's the pioneering company in the career reentry space. We over 100 employers to launch and expand their own in house programs and we lead a community of over 90,000 relaunchers whom we define as professionals returning to work after a career break from between one and over 20 years, a quick introduction. Um In my role at I relaunch, I co-lead the consulting practice with the CEO and owner Carol Fishman Cohen. And I also co-lead the Stem Reentry task force with the Society of Women Engineers, also known as SW if you're not familiar with it, I joined, I relaunched last year following my retirement from IBM where I spent 35 fulfilling years as an engineer manager and then in the last 20 years as an executive in many different roles, uh mostly leading large worldwide development teams.

In my last role, though I had the incredible opportunity to create IB M's tech reentry program as part of the stem reentry task force. Uh When I retired four years later, the program was operating in four countries, 22 cities and in almost every IBM business unit. During that time, I had the privilege of working with over 100 relaunchers. And um I also got to work with the other employers in the stem reentry task force. Now at I relaunch, I have the rewarding job of helping employers create and pilot their own successful programs. And there's more of my background in my linkedin profile. The objective of this session is to share how employers have implemented stem reentry program, successful ones. Uh What does this term even mean? Um I wanna cover some of the best practices and then review high-level steps in starting a pilot program at your own employer. I'll be referencing the stem reentry task force a lot which I already have uh which was established by SU and I relaunch in August of 2015. There were seven founding member employers and you can see them listed there each year. Starting in January, a new set of employers join the task force. Uh The cohort of employers meets monthly and gets the support they need to pilot return to work programs in their own companies.

And I will paste the the task force website in the chat um at the end or you can just Google it, but I'll definitely cut and paste it at the end. Here is a list of employers in the stem re entry task force by the year that they joined. And you can see many familiar employer names from all different industries. It, automotive manufacturing, pharmaceutical and aerospace. We are excited to be working this year with Eaton Apple and nasa's Jet propulsion lab whose team was in worldwide news with their perseverance rover landing and exploration of Mars. And I hope you caught some of that really exciting uh footage to see if creating a return to work program at your place of work. Makes sense. I want you to answer these two questions and you don't have to put it in the chat. Just answer it to yourselves. First, would your company like to increase the representation of experienced diverse technical talent? And second, there's your company struggle finding experience, diverse technical talent. And if you answered yes to both of the questions, the environment is right in your employer to consider a return to work program.

And that's these two reasons are the most majority, vast, vast majority of the reasons employers create stem reentry programs because they want to improve both of those questions. So what are stem reentry programs? They are programs that offer full time paid, stem roles for experienced talent, looking to rejoin the workforce after taking time away to be a candidate for one of these programs you need to be experienced and you also have to have a career gap of between one and over 20 years.

Employers offer support for the relaunchers through the whole program. And it's, the program is sometimes known as a cohort, which varies between two and six months. There are various program models. Um And in, in this short 20 minute time window, I only have time to cover the very uh two of them which are the most common um which are return model. And our direct hire model. Right now, the vast vast majority of stem reentry programs are internship models. And in a internship program, the experienced professional with a career gap is hired into an internship like program where support getting back up to speed is provided over the course of the program. And by internship like, I mean, the university summer um a short term assignments that we offer university students at the end of the program, the employer makes a decision to convert the relaunch to a permanent role. The relaunch also makes a decision on whether the experience was a match for them as well. And employers with their internship model also al often treat the program as an intent to hire program because they are hiring the relaunchers into the program with a different lens, a much more critical lens than they would be looking at hiring internships at a university in a direct hire program.

The only difference is that the relaunchers is hired as a permanent employee from the very start of the program. There are pros and cons with both of these models and with all the other models that are out there. And I wish I had more time to get into that. Most models have a cohort of relaunchers who go through the program together and you can learn more about the power of the cohort by reading the Harvard business review article by Harold uh Carol Fishman Cohen and the link is there. But I will also put the link to that in the chat before I sign off. Um So stay tuned to the end if you're interested or you can try to Google the power of the cohort and see if you come up with the article. Um Any questions as I go on, you can ask them in the chat and then I'm gonna get them to them at the end. So you can see um that there are a number of reasons for C breaks, not all relaunchers took breaks to raise their Children. And it's important to understand that you can see some of the other reasons listed there. And this picture is of me with the pilot cohort of IB M's Tech Reentry program. In 2016, we had six relaunchers in two different locations.

One in New York and one in Ohio in New York State in uh the United States when we started. So I started very over four countries into um and working with over 100 relaunchers. And really that is the goal of most of the programs is to expand beyond the pilot. You may have wondered why return to work programs are getting established and growing. And that's because relaunchers are true, gems of the workforce, they are highly educated. The data from I relaunch is past 28 return to work conferences. Tell us that 100% of the relaunchers hold a bachelor's degree and 70% have a graduate degree. 92% of our network are women. 70% have at least 10 years of work experience prior to their breaks. They are a more stable life stage which means fewer relocations and they bring a mature perspective to the workplace that you don't get with. The many, many university hires that employers are, are hiring. And then finally, this demographic has incredible energy and enthusiasm.

Really second to none and they are determined to succeed. They're determined to prove it to themselves, their friends, their family and their colleagues from my experience as guiding employers through piloting their own return to work programs. I wanted to share some best practice in a few key areas.

First is getting executive buy in. You can only make so much progress with a grassroots effort and the most likely scenario for success is when the grassroots effort has um high level support from the top. So you have uh a, a support network and the passion from the bottom and support from the top to gain that critical buy in. You're going to need to first state the challenge you're trying to address and then gather the relative supporting facts. This can include data such as diversity, data of your technical population and where in the organization you're hiring. The ideal place to pilot a program is at the intersection of those two data points when recruiting program participants. So moving over to this uh center left column, uh you might want to consider two main areas internal to your employer and outside your employer. The area that gets the most success is through the employee referrals, internal employee referrals. So it's important not to discount that important outreach also consider looking at regrettable losses. And what I mean by that is talent that's left your organization in good standing externally. Sw and I relaunches huge outreach helps as does partnering with university alumni networks and the vast use of social media. The next is training stakeholders. And what I mean by that is like recruiters, managers, mentors and other support personnel.

I hear frequently from employers that they don't think they needed training until they attended a training session. And the purpose of this training is to create an environment where relaunchers can thrive during the recruiting process. And also during the internship program and providing this education on the relaunch your demographic. Um what they worry about how to make the most comfortable, what they're thinking about. Um And the details of the program is absolutely key uh for training, especially your managers and recruiters.

For the next best practice. These programs are paid assignments with competitive compensation program management works with human resources and talent management to determine the compensations. Uh The compensation strategy and considerations include the person's education, their experience and skill, their location, their role, their benefit, uh the benefits you want to offer and local labor laws and and many more things. But it's important to work with um hr and talent management to determine that tracking the program and participants progress is the next best practice over in the center right column. Developing relaunch your work and development plans is the first critical step, tracking progress through weekly meetings and adding mitigation plans if needed is a next key step and then holding managers accountable for midterm evaluations and final evaluations is another step.

Having timely feedback, which is a good overall management. Pre practice is more critical for relaunchers who have a limited time to showcase their skills and ability. Finally, at the end of the cohort, it's important to evaluate the program pilot and develop your future strategy and some metrics to consider tracking when you're working on the pilot are the number of viable applicants offers made and final pilot participants um conversion rates to permanent full time employee, the stakeholders experiences and employees pride in the program.

And again, those are just a sampling. There are many, many to choose from a best practice is to survey stakeholders at the end of the program, relaunchers managers, recruiters, mentors and others and factor that input into your strategy or some employers conduct lessons learned sessions and where it's ver it's um it's live and you're getting feedback from these live meetings in developing a future strategy, consider expansion into new functional areas, adding business units, piloting in new countries and new geographies as well as increasing the cohort size and the program frequency.

So you're going to want to consider all those things when putting together your strategy. And then this is a typical program development cycle and it's used as a guide for program managers. You first want to define the program with the various program parameters, understanding the length of the assignment, the training needs locations, how many uh re launchers, the compensation, et cetera. Next is to identify the resources needed in the organization, your executive sponsors and it could be more than one, it could be more than one area of the business hr and talent acquisition resources, diversity and inclusion and then the managers are are needed resources as well as what we call your own hidden jewels, self returners who joined your employee, your employers without the support of a return to work program.

There are these self relaunchers in every single organization and so many of them share their struggles with trying to get back into the workplace, not being understood, struggling with self-confidence and all those things that return to work programs and the support they offer address, socialize the program through various internal channels at first and then externally and then train the stakeholders.

Then you want to develop orientation plans for the first week or so or spread that needed information over the course of the cohort and determine what the ongoing program for the relaunchers is going to look like. Are you going to have employee lunch and learns? Are you going to have executive spotlights to showcase a certain executive area? Um Many, many different topics you can bring to the relaunchers as programming goes. Uh You want to evaluate performance and communicate the conversion decisions and then lastly, you wanna collect feedback that we just talked about from various stakeholders and refine the program and begin again the um in closing, if you are a relaunch, you can join the I relaunch community at I relaunch.com.

And you can also check out the resources on the stem reentry task force pay website. And I'm I'm going to um post that link in a minute if you are an employer first would work with your hr team to determine if your employer could benefit from starting a return to work program. Think back to those two questions I asked in the very beginning, you can also reference resources in this session as well as those on the task force site. And I'm gonna get to questions, but I want to thank you for attending the session and enjoy the rest of the conference. But let me take a minute to um get to the questions. I'm a member and fan of relaunch. Oh, good. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Thank you. Um I'm from Sylvania and searching for the opportunities to get back into the work as a software engineer. I've taken a career break. Um And absolutely, uh uh, thank you so much. Uh, e eerie, eerie ear y eerie. Um I know I'm botching your name. Oh, Winifred. That makes sense. Um Winifred posted already the I relaunched website. We have a whole community for relaunchers. Uh There's a Facebook community, um, where we have coaches monitor questions that come up.

And the best part about the Facebook community is the support from fellow relaunchers and the relaunchers that have relaunched successfully, want to get back and share their experiences. So, absolutely check that out. And then also look at our roadmap product, um, and it's under our relaunch, your tab in our website. And the road map is a step by step guide and it is the, um the web version of updated version of this book back on the career track that Carol Fishman Cohen, uh, co-wrote a number of years ago and the road map is listed in the need to build. I'm a student in Code Institute and finally, after long illness would like to return. Wonderful uh Magdalena. That's, that's great. Check out the resources that I relaunched and I am going to just while we have a minute, I'm going to type in the I relaunched website or the stem reentry task force. And then on the relaunch, I am going to get to return to work and I'll post that direct link. Actually, let me stop sharing. I don't wanna hit leave be, oh, here, stop hearing. Here is the road map link.

And then let me just quickly bring up uh Carol's uh cohort the power of the cohort article that I mentioned. OK, and there's a link to that article. Um Wonderful Navina. Thank you for following the I relaunch linkedin page. Definitely do that. Um And thank you so much. I love also what I do in my retirement kind of job, although it's full time, it's wonderful being able to work with relaunchers um and employers to help connect the two. Um And if there are no further questions, I know I'm a couple minutes over and thank you so much for joining and I wish you a great good luck in your relaunch and good luck um with the rest of the conference and enjoy take care of everyone.