Juniper Networks’ CTO On Combating The IT Talent Shortage And Creating A Diverse Pipeline Through Mentorship

How can mentorship and career development help build a pipeline for diverse talent?  

[Career development courses] can be used to create a pipeline for a more diverse staff because [many people] suddenly come to a stage in life where they are an individual contributor and nobody asked them: ‘Do you want to manage a team?’ This process helps them identify or think about their goals. That’s the role of the mentor. ‘Oh, you want to develop into a manager? That’s great, let’s look at the possibilities.’ I have one engineer — she’s very good. She was in software development and user experience and now, she wants to become manager. And nobody asked her, so she was very frustrated, and I just happened to ask her: ‘Have you considered this verses that?’ And it’s good to sort of just start creating such possibilities rather than instructing people on what to do. The mentorship program itself has expanded to every [department]. The Juniper HR department created a company-wide program, and we created a separate program for women. We want to focus on women leadership and mentorship for them and finding people from inside and outside to mentor them.

The same program is useful for creating a pipeline for diversity. If you go to historically Black colleges and universities, which happened to be on the East Coast — when I visited, they did not want to come to the West Coast. But providing mentorship to undergraduates allows them to start looking at these possibilities. I noticed the same thing in Texas and California, especially in schools with a large number of Hispanic students — this creates a hiring pipeline if you can have mentorship programs there. And once they get hired, they are in a very unfamiliar environment. So, having mentors for them also helps.