29 April

The Heart of Social Mobility - Strategy and Data

Thursday 29^th April saw the first of our Power of Inclusion seminars take place with an exciting virtual presentation entitled, ‘Strategy and Data: The Heart of Social Mobility’. 

Our seminar series has now been running for eight years and this year will focus on the important issue of social mobility, exploring some of the structural barriers and internal beliefs that can stop people progressing in their careers.  

Sponsored by AON, the aim of the online session was to offer practical insights, tools, tips, and experiences from businesses who are currently collecting their own data and using it to progress their social mobility strategy.

We were joined by some fabulous panelists and Dan Robertson Director of VERCIDA Consulting chaired the event. The Rt Hon The Lord Mayor of the City of London, Alderman William Russell began the session by noting that in the last year social mobility has really suffered, indicating the importance of the issues we will be discussing during our programme of seminars. He highlighted the importance of measuring data in this area, especially across the life cycle of businesses and how it helps in identifying what you are doing well and what you could be doing better. 

Louise Watkins Managing Director, Head of EMEA Enterprise Risk at BlackRock focused her session on the start of the company’s journey, how they began their data collection as a company and some of their experiences when collecting the data. Louise also talked about her own personal experience, being from a Welsh mining town and how she suffered from Imposter Syndrome when originally coming to the City. 

We then heard from Jenny Baskerville, KPMG’s Director Head of Inclusion, Diversity and Social Equality who provided a lot of useful tools and tips for businesses on collecting data. She discussed how to determine what social mobility questions to ask, how to educate colleagues around the barriers of social mobility and also looked at tips to increase response rates.

Our final speaker Terry Laville-Farrant, UK People Director at AON begun his session looking at how as a company they have approached inclusion and diversity from a strategic perspective. He also discussed AON’s worldwide initiatives for social mobility and how as a global company they have invested into programmes across the globe. 

The panellists were then joined by Paula Kemp, Employer Engagement Lead at the Social Mobility Commission for an open Q&A session where attendees were able to ask direct questions to the panel. A popular question which came up throughout the session was around what data to collect and what questions should be asked. Helpfully The Social Mobility Commission have a toolkit available to assist with this and offer guidance and it can be found here

Our next Power of Inclusion event takes place on the 19^th May and is titled ‘Outreach and Recruitment: Future proofing your talent pipeline’.  We will be joined by expert panellists, practitioners and thought leaders and you can find out more here.

To find out more about our Power of Inclusion initiative as a whole and how your business can get involved head over here.