An Analysis of Diversity Training Provided by Business and Industry
Work in Progress at the University of Illinois
Rose Mary Cordova-Wentling
Demographers predict that by the year 2000, 85 percent of the new
workers will be a combination of immigrants, women, and non-European
Americans. Increasingly, workplaces will face the same issues and
problems that public schools have been facing with regard to
understanding and utilizing the full range of human potential within
this very diverse population.
In the past, for many reasons women and non-European Americans have
not been as successful, by any measures, as European American males in
the world of work. For example, in 1986, Korn/Ferry found that of
1,362 senior executives only 29 were women and 13 were people of
color, a total of 3 percent at a time when women and people of color
made up 51.4 percent of the workforce. Fortune magazine's 1990 survey
of 799 companies turned up only 19 women among the 4,012 directors and
highestpaid executives. Not much has changed since 1978, when the
same survey produced only 10 women among 6,400 executives. This kind
of underutilization of human potential is not only harmful to the
individual, but is also harmful to business, and all the complex
interweavings of the social fabric.
We are at a critical point in history where two forces are in a
position to reverse this situation: the School-to-Work Opportunities
Act and diversity training.
School-to-Work Opportunities Act
The School-to-Work Opportunities Act provides states with federal
assistance to develop and implement a statewide school-to-work
transition system to assist new entrants to the labor force. An
important component of this legislation is the creation of
partnerships between schools and employers. The legislation seeks to
include employers as full partners in providing students with
high-quality, work-based learning through job training or work
experiences. One of the major goals for this system is to assist all
students in the successful transition from school into meaningful,
highquality employment.
What Is "Diversity?"
There are numerous ways in which different individuals have defined
diversity. Definitions of the term range from narrow to very broad.
Narrow definitions tend to reflect Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)
law and define diversity in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, age,
national origin, religion, and disability. Broad definitions may also
include sexual orientation, values, personality characteristics,
education, language, physical appearance, martial status, lifestyle,
beliefs, and background characteristics such as geographic origin,
tenure with the organization, and economic status. This project has
focused on diversity in the broadest sense, which includes all the
different characteristics that make one individual different from
another. The major purpose for defining diversity so broadly is that
it is all-inclusive and recognizes everyone as part of the diversity
that should be valued.
Implications of Workforce Diversity
The ethnic, racial, cultural, and gender composition of school age
youth is much more diverse than that of the contemporary workforce,
and this has implications for the implementation of the work-based
learning (WBL) component of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act.
Over the next 20 years, the U.S. population is expected to grow by 42
million. Hispanics will account for 47 percent of this growth.
African-Americans will account for 22 percent. Asians and other people
of color will make up 18 percent of this increase, while Caucasians
will account for only 13 percent. These and other statistics indicate
that in the future, minority growth will exceed non-minority growth in
the workplace, thereby promoting the need to understand the
implications of workforce diversity.
As business, industry, and schools struggle to come to terms with
"diversity," the question of how to accommodate workforce diversity
has become a primary focus and a major challenge. The question of how
to work with employers to implement the School-to-Work Opportunities
Act and accommodate the work-based learning needs of a diverse group
of students will also become a major challenge.
Why Try to Change?
In their 1994 Training magazine article Allison Rossett and Terry
Bickham indicated some reasons organizations provide diversity
programs:
- Compliance (wanting to do what is expected of them by taxpayers,
shareholders, or society)
- Harmony (wanting all employees to understand and appreciate each
other)
- Inclusion (wanting underrepresented employees to succeed)
- Justice (wanting to correct past wrongs)
- Transformation (wanting to change the way the organization does
business in order to take into account diverse employees, customers,
and markets)
Diversity training should enable these companies to be better prepared
to accommodate the needs of the students placed in their charge for
work-based learning. And, indeed, many of the nation's major
employing companies (many of them multinational corporations) have
initiated training for new and continuing employees to try to achieve
a wide array of diversity goals in their high performance workplaces.
For example, American Express has developed systematic training
programs that link diversity, team building, and quality. All their
employees are required to attend and to develop action plans based on
the skills and awareness acquired in the training. The top managers
at General Foods spend a specified period of time learning to
understand diversity and its linkage to quality. U.S. West, a
Denver-based telecommunication company, has had diversity training
programs for many years. All their employees, including officers, the
president, and the chair of the board have attended diversity training
sessions on a regular basis.
However, such companies are not likely to be geographically accessible
to the large number of students in urban and rural settings who will
participate in school-to-work programs. These students will more
likely be placed in small firms where diversity training is limited if
provided at all.
According to diversity expert Dr. John Fernandez in his 1993 book The
Diversity Advantage, business and educational organizations that learn
to use diversity as an asset will stride ahead of those that don't.
The payoff will be increased productivity, higher quality, more
adaptability to change, more innovation, and increased job tenure.
This research project is intended to facilitate the implementation of
the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and help to assure that the
social environment at work-based learning sites will be conducive to
the vocational and social needs of a diverse student population.
This study is designed to address the following major key questions:
- What are the social barriers that have inhibited the employment,
development, retention, and promotion of underrepresented groups in
the workforce, and are likely to affect the successful implementation
of school-to-work programs?
- What effective strategies/practices/policies are being used to
remove these barriers and what are the implications for training?
What are appropriate ways for school personnel to intervene on behalf
of students, and can this be done in a training mode?
- What are the goals of effective diversity training programs? What
are the environmental characteristics of effective work-based learning
sites? What social goals should be espoused for all students in
work-based learning programs?
- What criteria relative to diversity should be used to evaluate the
quality of work-based learning sites?
Project's Progress and Purpose
Through the use of in-depth literature review; interviews with
diversity experts; on-site case studies of selected diversity training
programs; and focus groups with school-to-work directors, this project
will collect the information needed to answer the above questions.
Research will be completed in fall 1996.
Results are intended to provide information needed by school-to-work
program coordinators as they select sites for work-based learning, and
by work-site supervisors of WBL programs as they train students who
are likely to be younger and more ethnically and culturally diverse
than today's American workforce.
For more information, please contact the following individuals at
NCRVE, University of Illinois, 345 College of Education, Champaign, IL
61820. Rose Mary Wentling, (217) 333-0807, FAX (217) 244-5632. Mildred
Griggs, (217) 333-0960, FAX (217) 333-5847
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