TOP COMPANY FOR
TALENT PIPELINE
No. 3 in the DiversityInc Top 50
This remarkable company has a very deep-it serves, which starts at the top with Chai
recognizes the gap in future workforce tale
is proactively addressing that problem. The
dented $100 million to AT&T Aspire, a phil
rate, which is particularly acute among low
AT&T Aspire includes:
;Job shadowing for 100,000 students in
conjunction with Junior Achievement, the
largest corporate job-shadowing Junior
Achievement has ever undertaken
;Grants for school districts and nonprofits focused on high-school retention and
preparing students for the workforce, with
particular attention to at-risk students
;Commissioning the next chapter of major
research on solutions to the high-school-dropout rate
“AT&T believes our greatest challenge and our obligation as
business leaders is to make sure we are preparing our nation’s
children to enter the workforce and fill our talent pipeline,”
said Laura Sanford, president of AT&T Foundation. “Let me
share with you some alarming statistics: By 2020, three-quarters of
all jobs in America will be highly paid and require high skills that
will require an estimated 123 million Americans to fill those jobs.
However, at current high-school- and college-graduation rates, an
astonishing shortfall of only 50 million Americans are expected to
qualify for them. This reality is why we created AT&T Aspire.”
She said AT&T’s signature philanthropic giving program focuses
on high-school success and workforce-readiness initiatives.
“Our dollars target programs that serve those most at risk for
dropping out and with the least access to programs that can help
them develop the skills they need for career success,” Sanford told
the audience. “We’re also pleased to see more programs emerging
that stay with their clients through their early years in the workplace, helping them break through the barriers that still exist that
are preventing all populations from being represented at the levels
they should be in mid- and senior-level management.”
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