From the President’s Desk - 2022 in review
Iretomiwa Olukiyesi, P.Eng, FEC is the President of Black Engineers of Canada
These are very exciting times for BEC, as we launched our website for you to discover more about BEC and leverage our job board to grow your careers. I would like to thank our over sixty BEC volunteers who have worked tirelessly to improve the lives of every Black Engineers and Engineering graduates in Canada for the past two and a half years. Their work is enhancing the pathways to excellence for every BEC member.
In February I told our members and guests at our Annual General Meeting that BEC will execute the first year of the three-year strategic plan developed 2021.
Our strategic plan for the next few years are summarized below:
For our operations, we are:
Establishing good governance practices
Developing and maintaining high performance operations
Forming partnerships and establishing partnership agreements that align with the partnership policy
Conducting yearly performance reviews, and establish succession planning process
Building both short- and long-term financial strategy.
For our community, we are:
Creating programs for Black engineering graduates and engineers , such as entrepreneurship incubation, coaching and mentorship, etc.,
Creating a talent pool for industry employers
Recognizing Black engineering graduates and engineers for their accomplishments,
Forming scholarships through partnerships
In 2022 we selected a few priorities we could tackle such as developing strong governance, creating a talent pool and creating and executing programs that have proven to help our members get jobs and get promotions.
I would like to report that in 2022, we have continued to develop our governance policies. In Programs, we have delivered five speed mentoring sessions that have successfully matched 26 mentors to 87 mentees with a large report of members getting jobs and getting promoted. We have delivered three Masterclass series that have improved our members knowledge on how to tackle the licensure process and two Masterclass series for Proactive job search that helped our members get better jobs and engineering jobs. Today we are creating the platform for the talent pool. Our focus for the next couple of months is to ensure that every Black Canadian Engineer or Engineering graduate is visible in our talent pool. Our partnership team has worked very hard to line up many potential talent partners interested in our talent pool. We would continue to execute our impactful mentoring and masterclass programs. We are also gathering data to understand the needs of our members who are interested in being entrepreneurs and how our partners can support them to succeed.
I am asking that you continue to promote BEC to your colleagues and others in your network so that we may succeed together.
Thank you.
