Customer & Community

Talent Attraction, Development & Retention

Attraction

Learning and Inclusion continues to attract, develop, and retain talented employees who possess a broad array of skills, backgrounds, and experiences. We know that diversity is a key driver of innovation and high performance, and therefore our goal is to capitalize on these benefits while also resembling the communities we serve.

At Con Edison, we offer many exciting career opportunities, and we continue to stand out as an employer of choice. In 2021, 709 new employees joined the company, including 21 percent women and 56 percent people of color.

Our talent acquisition strategies are designed to attract and engage candidates from many sources, including, targeted job fairs, social media, professional industry associations, the military, and partnerships with educational institutions. Our partnerships are important to us as they enable us to develop a diverse talent pipeline of candidates throughout our recruiting territory. For example. collaborating with Nontraditional Employment for Women, Hour Children and Helmets to Hardhats are key resources in helping us attract more women to non-traditional jobs. We also work with community, nonprofit, and professional groups, including the Society or Women Engineers (SWE), National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), and American Association of Black in Energy (AABE). To further invest in the communities we serve, Con Edison partnered with several New York City Career and Technical High Schools to support their curriculum development and develop strong school-to-industry pipelines.

This is an exciting time in our Company, and we are well positioned to engage students who are interested in careers in the utility sector. Through our Leadership Development program, we recruit recent college graduates and provide them with opportunities to gain leadership skills and practical experiences that promote critical thinking and analysis. Our 2021 LDP cohort consists of 48 percent women and 64 percent people of color.

Our veteran strategy continues to be an important part of our talent pipeline. We recruited former active-duty personnel and current members of the National Guard and Reserves. Con Edison is also an active member of Veterans in Energy in Washington, DC. which provides the company with a national presence in the Veterans sector. In 2021 we continued to partner with the Veterans Administration to market career opportunities to disabled veterans. We engaged with many veteran strategic partners to help build and support our veteran pipeline, including, Soldier for Life, Ft Drum NY, NYS Department of Military Affairs, and The Wounded Warrior Project. In 2021, among other awards, Con Edison was recognized for its veteran hiring efforts in the Military Times – “Best for Vets” Designation, for the fourth year in a row and Vets Index 2021 “Three Star Award”. By leveraging the Veterans of Con Edison Employee Resource Group and over 200 strategic partnerships, we hired 68 veterans in 2021.

Development & Retention

We care about our employees, and we are committed to their success. We make it a priority to help them build skills and knowledge to further their growth and careers, including developing additional leadership competencies, attending continuing education classes, and providing tuition reimbursement.

Our corporate mentoring programs – “Corporate Mentoring Program” and “Executive Mentoring Program” – provide multiple opportunities to connect more skilled and experienced employees with newer or less experienced employees to share insights and professional guidance, while also growing important networks within the company.

We understand the critical role that sponsorship plays in career development and advancement. In 2021 we launched our Executive Sponsorship Program, a 24-month experience designed for high potential leaders. The program supported high participation among women and people of color. Providing underrepresented groups with executive connections is an important step in our efforts to develop our employees and build a broadly diverse and inclusive leadership team.

To encourage wide-spread career development, our suite of career management resources includes internal and external training to enhance job knowledge, career development workshops, and a robust online career management site. Our leadership curriculum is designed to improve the ability of managers to lead employees effectively, handle problems creatively, and shepherd teams to elevated performance. More than 7,600 employees attended these programs and continue to benefit from an array of tools, assessments and resources that assist with their professional development.

As we moved toward a hybrid work environment, we focused on the needs of our leaders and proactively offered a new series of short, focused virtual workshops on Navigating the Next Normal. This sequel to our prior years’ series provided guidance, tips, and tools for leaders of employees returning to the workplace and working in distributed teams and reinforced key themes of open communication, enhancing productivity, and creating synergy.

The past two years saw the pandemic’s impact on our society in significant ways. As part of our response to the COVID crisis the company offered mental health counseling, bereavement counseling, parenting and home school resources, emergency childcare for essential workers, and training for managers on how to manage with empathy and compassion.

At an annual turnover rate of approximately 6.4 percent, our overall retention rate continues to be high, with 42 percent due to retirements. We attribute the company’s low turnover to our persistent focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, employee development, and commitment to fostering a culture where everyone feels welcomed and valued.

Skills Training

Our critical focus continues to be to ensure our workforce has the right skills, knowledge, and capabilities to work in a safe manner while meeting the needs of our customers. To achieve this goal, we provide continuous state-of-the-art training and development to our employees in a wide variety of areas.

The company offers robust training programs in gas, electric, customer, steam, construction, engineering, and substation operations, as well as driver training. These programs ensure employee skills, knowledge, and performance are maintained at the highest levels. Our Learning Center fosters a culture of continuous improvement, centered on safety, operational excellence, diversity, equity and inclusion, and enhancing the customer experience.

With safety as our key business priority, we partner with our operating organizations to strengthen our focus on a zero-harm culture, which includes several digital learning modules. Operational Excellence Guiding Principles are integrated into our training curriculum and highlight the need to respect the complexity, power, and unforgiving nature of our energy systems and encourage all to manage them safely. This effort includes a focus on Human Performance Improvement (HPI) tools, mindfulness, psychological safety, and cyber awareness.

In 2021, we partnered with our internal business partners and stakeholders to meet the high testing and training demand for new entry-level utility workers. We safely and successfully tested and trained 230 employees for Electric Operations. Our purposeful field visit program continues to support our efforts to enhance the learning experience, using insights from live events to assess potential gaps and training requirements and providing opportunities for real-time constructive feedback.

Training Effectiveness Committee are the liaison between our operating areas and training teams, and they serve to achieve, improve, and maintain quality and consistency in training. Ongoing meetings with subject matter experts from various areas allow a collective review of training activities, including curriculum, new policies and procedures, annual goals, career path and tests to ensure consistency, relevancy, and effectiveness in training offerings.

In 2021, we made headway in designing and implementing the early phase of our new digital learning initiative, which promises to transform how our employees learn now and into the future. This is an opportunity to innovative and leverage technology to improve curriculum content and to provide employees with deeper learning experiences in-and-outside of the classroom. We have already begun to enhance our digital portfolio to incorporate various learning tools to facilitate learning, such as e-books and technical training. Also, 132 digital tools, including 63 virtual classes, were created in 2021.

Our strategic focus on developing our people benefits our employees and helps us attract and retain a richly diverse and inclusive workforce at all levels.

A Brighter Future. Con Edison employs more than 14,000 employees. Meet some of them here.