News Dec 5, 2019

Celebrating Latino Excellence at Jacobs

It’s been an action-packed few months for Enlace, our Latino employee network.

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2019 has been an incredible year for our global Latino team members, who’ve worked together throughout the year to promote inclusion both inside Jacobs and with the clients and communities that we serve.

One of our core values at Jacobs is “we live inclusion” – and this was never clearer than transforming the U.S.’ Hispanic Heritage Month in to a global Latino Heritage Month celebration across our company. Between September 15 and October 15, our teams organized multiple celebrations, presentations and events to celebrate Latino culture and history.

Led by Enlace – our Latino employee network with nearly 1,000 members across the globe – events ranged from salsa dancing lessons in London and mariachi bands in Oakland to interviews with our clients in Florida and Los Angeles.

Celebrating Latino Excellence at Jacobs
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We also used the occasion to help make a difference by supporting Jacobs’ global workplace giving campaign benefiting Water For People (WFP), a non-profit that supports rural communities that lack access to potable water and sanitation solutions. 18 Jacobs volunteers raised their hands to host fundraisers in their local offices, building on a rich history of partnership with WFP where our employees have travelled to rural Third World communities to provide technical support to key water and wastewater projects.

Continuing the positive momentum from Latino Heritage Month was our presence at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) 43rd National Convention in Phoenix. SHPE’s mission is to “change lives by empowering the Hispanic community to realize its fullest potential and to impact the world through STEM awareness, access, support, and development.”

The SHPE National Conference is known to be the largest gathering of Hispanic STEM professionals and students in the U.S., and this year the convention gathered more than 9,000 attendees. We recognize the increasing relevance of Latino talent pipeline and are a strategic partner of SHPE. This year, we sponsored and participated in a number of events at the convention, including a roundtable on bringing more Latinas through STEM outreach programs, a career fair and job interview session and a presentation from our Enlace leaders on digital twin technologies in municipal facilities.

Perhaps the highlight of the event was the Jacobs-hosted networking and scholarship reception, where Enlace announced SHPE scholarships for two our outstanding Latino students: Karyna Villalba, from the University of Florida and Christopher Amaro from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

By partnering with organizations like SHPE and celebrating culture in this way, we’re aiming to not only recruit and develop the best and most diverse global talent, but also help bring a whole new generation of outstanding Latino people into our industry.

Find out more about how you can play your part in our success story here.