Helping Drive Career Opportunities for Individuals without Four-Year Degrees:

Equitable access to jobs is a critical component of social and economic prosperity. Skills-first considerations are becoming important to the way organizations define work, deploy talent, manage careers, and value employees. Yet requirements of four-year degrees for the majority of positions continue to prevent many individuals who may have relevant skills and experience to bring to a role, but have not had access to a four-year degree, from securing family sustaining career opportunities.

Deloitte is helping to building bridges and pathways between education, skills training, and employment for diverse populations. We do so by providing firsthand professional experiences through our own skills-based hiring, apprenticeships, and related programs. We have launched a number of these programs over the past few years and have begun to scale them. These programs all contribute to our commitment to broaden our talent pipelines and attract, develop, and support the advancement of more professionals without four-year degrees as a member of the OneTen coalition. One of the organizations we have collaborated with to help make some of these programs a reality is the New York Jobs CEO Council (NYJCC).

NYJCC is a coalition of CEOs committed to providing access to high-potential jobs for 100,000 low-income New Yorkers by 2030, including 25,000 from the City University of New York (CUNY). Deloitte became a coalition member in 2021, and our work with them has mainly focused on hosting interns through NYJCC’s apprenticeship programs with CUNY. In Spring 2023 we hosted the first five CUNY associate degree students in our Innovation and Technology practice for a 12-week internship. Students were able to gain on-the-job experience, training, and mentorship during the program. In addition to their program income, participants received academic credits towards obtaining their 2-year associate degree. All five of the interns received an offer to join Deloitte upon completion of the program, and 100% of them accepted their offers and joined our organization as full-time employees in September 2023.

Coming off the success of this first cohort, in early February 2024 we welcomed five more CUNY associate degree students as interns to participate in the NYJCC Spring 2024 Apprenticeship Program. Over 12 weeks, these students will have the opportunity to rotate through four functions of our Innovation and Technology practice (Engineering, Infrastructure, Customer Success, and Tech Research).