How Employers Can Work with Tribal Schools to Increase Diversity in STEM

by Tracy Monteith and Ross SmithOn October 16, 2017 0 comments

There are 32 fully accredited tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) in the US with over 30,000 part and full-time students. TCUs support students in the most remote and poorest areas of the country. There are 183 tribal K-12 schools in 23 states. According to the National Science Foundation, these schools - along with non-tribal colleges and universities - produce a total of about 4,000 STEM undergraduate and graduate students per year.

Despite the high demand for STEM hires, corporate recruiting looks to spend on high-leverage recruiting events. While the numbers above may not seem to be high-leverage bonanza, a better understanding of this community can illuminate tremendous opportunities to hire world class talent from the collective of the first inhabitants of North America. Hiring these diverse thinkers requires a new approach.

Tribes are matriarchal in nature. Clanships are inherited from the maternal side of the family. They are also community-based, and top priority of tribal members is community health and well-being. This innate disposition translates, in the modern workplace, to great team members that intrinsically understand the value of a cohesive team and actively work toward building community as a way of finding the common in the diverse. It also means a higher percentage of female STEM majors.

Hiring from these communities is a relationship-based arrangement built on trust. It is why college coaches go to the homes and sit with the family. Recruiting and retaining tribal STEM employees requires HR professionals to think differently – to go beyond the numbers, and to get to know both the “hardware” and the “software” of each STEM candidate.

Wouldn’t it be great if all next generation STEM talent was in the same place, so hiring could be a high-leverage activity? Most colleges and universities have student tribal groups. Most universities and colleges have student groups that support tribal students, even the Ivy Leagues. Additionally, the not-for-profit American Science and Engineering Society (AISES.org) has been supporting STEM students and professionals for the last four decades.

HR professionals know that hiring diverse talent has a big payoff and requires a creative approach. Tribal schools, along with organizations like AISES can offer access to a wealth of STEM talent.

Resources

AISES.ORG

SHRM Recruiting Native Americans for STEM careers

Bureau of Indian Education

Learn more at the 2017 SHRM Diversity & Inclusion Conference & Exposition.

Tracy Monteith is a member of the Eastern Band Cherokee tribe. Tracy is member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. Professionally he is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft where he leads Native American’s at Microsoft. He has been working in the software industry for more than two decades in a wide range of roles and industries including transportation, pharmaceutical, banking, and education.

His most recent work in language preservation includes the Cherokee language as part of the Windows and Office ecosystems, prototyping ancient language translations using machine learning, and conducting hackathons for IoT devices and cloud services. He lives on a farm in the pacific northwest with his wife, two boys, a pack of coyotes, a herd of deer, two dogs, nine horses, one pony, one cat, and 254,931 honey bees.

Ross Smith really enjoys getting a paycheck to “play” with software for 25 years now, over 20 at Microsoft. In September, 2014, he was nominated and accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He is one of the authors of “The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention” and holds six patents. 42projects has aspired to promote cultural change, “bring buzz and laughter to the hallways”. He is a member of the leadership council for the Anita Borg Institute. He was also part of the organizing committee for TEDxSeattle, and has recently been working closely with iUrbanTeen.org and Spreeha.

In addition to his passion for creative techniques to improve the quality of the experience of using software, he’s explored organizational trust, enterprise gamification, management innovation, diversity and the future of education through games and with the Skype in the Classroom program. In December 2011, he was invited to the White House for a discussion on women in STEM. He was the keynote speaker for the American Road and Transportation Builder’s Transovation event in Fall 2014. The work of his teams have been mentioned in Forbes, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, PSFK, the American Journal of Play, Harvard Business Review, and the London School of Business. He is a blogger for the Society for Human Resource Management's SHRM Blog and regularly posts on management innovation. He is most excited by the current work on Skype Translator.

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How Employers Can Work with Tribal Schools to Increase Diversity in STEM

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