A Place Where Everyone Wants to Work

The diversity challenge has been grabbing headlines recently – from the Oscar nominations to the National Football League. It’s been a hot topic for us in the technology industry for quite a while. While we’re not quite the NFL, the tech sector faces its own challenges in attracting, retaining and developing a diverse talent base.

At Adobe, we are pursuing a three-part strategy to enhance our global workforce diversity:

• • Investing in building a future pipeline of talent through our commitment to Youth Coding Initiatives, including partnerships with community organizations such as Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code and Technovation.
  • Ensuring that our hiring practices are attracting the best and most diverse candidates, through partnerships with Jopwell and LinkedIn as well as professional groups such as the National Society of Black Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
  • Delivering a great employee experience where our people can develop and grow, through a rich set of employee networks, benefits and internal development programs such as the Women’s Executive Shadow Program.

This strategy is showing some early progress, but this will be a multi-faceted, multi-year endeavor. Today we published a new diversity page on Adobe.com highlighting our strategy, stories about some of our fantastic employees, and our workforce metrics in the areas of gender and racial/ethnic diversity as reported in our Corporate Responsibility Report and EEO-1 government filing. While much of this information has been available before, we think it’s an important and positive step to put it all in one easy-to-find location.

While our numbers are clearly not where we want them to be, as a global growth company we have the opportunity to build these as we attract, retain and develop our employee base. This is important not only to us, but to our customers and stockholders as well.

As an industry, we have to look critically at ourselves and what we can do to move the needle. We need to rebrand ourselves with young people so they choose a technology career; we can’t be viewed as a cliquey community of “brogrammers” that is viewed as unappealing to a diverse community. We need to invest in the education, training and mentorship of future generations and support the transition from school to a technology career. And we need to do everything we can to provide a positive experience that attracts, retains and develops employees throughout their careers.

While we will not change the industry or the talent pipeline overnight, with focus, measurement and investment we can build a more representative and inclusive sector. At Adobe we will continue to strive to be a place where everyone wants to work and where everyone has a chance to grow and succeed.