Credit: Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies has launched the 2023 edition of its cross-company, women-focused mentorship program in Singapore, dubbed MentorConnect.
The program brings together a select group of the vendor’s customers and partners to promote “diverse leadership development” via networking and company-to-company best practice exchange.
Under MentorConnect, mentors from the participating organisations are tasked to help mentees develop hard and soft skills that will help them advance to the next stage of their careers.
At the kick-off event, Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information, Josephine Teo, shared that there is “a lot of value” in supporting women towards leadership roles, particularly in the technology sector.
“The essence of a successful mentorship program is the creation of structures and processes around which people can access wisdom not through luck, but through systematic intervention,” she added.
“By all accounts, MentorConnect is doing that, and I like the fact that this is a cross-company program. This feature alone is quite interesting, because the richest learnings for us as individuals will often come from people whose experiences overlap with ours the least.”
MentorConnect piloted in 2019 with eight mentors from Dell and three other participating organisations – Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Salesforce and ST Engineering.
According to Dell, the program has since grown to involve nearly 50 mentors from 11 companies, benefitting 276 high performing women mentees to date.
The 2023 cohort will see participation from 29 mentors and 150 mentees. Apart from the companies who were involved in the pilot, the other stakeholders who have joined the program are Aon, DBS, DXC Technology, Equinix, Google Cloud, J.P. Morgan, NTT Singapore, Prudential, and SCWO (Singapore Council of Women’s Organisation).
“Dell Technologies strives to create an inclusive corporate culture that drives meaningful work and impact for all our team members,” said Andy Sim, Dell’s vice president and managing director of Singapore.
“With Dell at the helm of the MentorConnect programme, we are working with industry partners to strengthen female representation in the tech sector. Our employees, together with other participating mentors, have the opportunity to do their part in preparing high performing women mentees to take on leadership roles.”
