EY: Mentoring Strengthens Our Communities and Our Careers
As both a talent leader and Director of Corporate Responsibility at EY, I’ve seen how being involved in mentoring and volunteering in our communities has a direct impact on employee engagement. At EY, we hire tens of thousands of smart young people around the world every year. We offer them the training, the coaching, and the experiences they need to grow professionally. Our promise to all our people is that we’ll give them world-class training and the chance to connect with great mentors.
This focus on people, team-building, and coaching is fundamental to how we run our business.
Volunteerism and programs like College MAP help us deliver on that promise. Through annual employee engagement surveys, we’ve learned that employees who participate in our community engagement efforts are more engaged, and employees who are College MAP mentors report being significantly more engaged. This includes longer tenure with the firm, best-in-class employee engagement, and even significantly higher performance ratings.
Employees also tell us that firm-sponsored volunteer activities like College MAP help them expand their networks and develop new leadership, business, and cross-cultural team-building skills. A great example is Devon Rollins, an EY Manager and College MAP Persistence Director, who talks about how being a mentor has influenced his own career journey.
“As a member of the College MAP team,” says Devon, “I’ve developed an increased aptitude for understanding people that has enriched my interactions with clients. The high schools we serve are as diverse as any client environment, so the College MAP experience functions as a training ground to navigate cross-cultural communities.”
Devon has also reflected that College MAP helped his career because it allows him to bring his ‘whole self’ to the table. “Through this program, I have forged an executive presence, become a better communicator, built capacity as an active listener and injected more goodwill into the world by shepherding students through one of the more impressionable points in their lives,” says Devon. “The cultivation of these skills has benefitted not just my career, but my life.”
I hope you’ll join Carolina Dominguez, the College MAP program national leader, and me at the upcoming National Mentoring Summit in Washington, DC, where we will share more insights and best practices on how private-sector mentoring can help corporations create shared value while also engaging their people.
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To learn more about the growing private sector role in the youth mentoring movement, download our report, Mentoring: At the crossroads of education, business and community. www.ey.com/us/youthmentoring