O’Reilly recognized for initiatives designed to amplify, educate, and recruit underrepresented communities in the tech industry
BOSTON—September 6, 2022—O’Reilly, the premier source for insight-driven learning on technology and business, today announced that it has been awarded a silver medal for excellence in the “Best Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Strategy” category by Brandon Hall Group’s 2022 Human Capital Management Awards program. O’Reilly was recognized for its efforts to elevate the voices of minorities—including women—in the technology industry on its learning platform, increasing the number of diverse hires within its workforce, and providing historically marginalized communities with opportunities to build technological skills.
To foster better representation in the technology industry, O’Reilly established a corporate goal to increase the number of experts on its platform who identify as members of an underrepresented community from 30% to 40% in 2021—a full 10 percentage points higher. Today, O’Reilly has achieved nearly 50% representation in its mix of instructors, authors, and speakers. Furthermore, 62% of its Superstream Series speakers in H1 came from diverse backgrounds.
Furthering its broader set of goals to create opportunities inclusive of all genders, races, ethnicities, religious views, sexual orientations, ages, and abilities, O’Reilly also reignited its Diversity & Inclusion Scholarship Program. Originally created to grant deserving talent from marginalized communities admission to its in-person events, the closure of O’Reilly’s conference business led the company to rethink how it could provide underrepresented technical talent with access to its community of experts. In 2021, O’Reilly revamped its scholarship program to award 500 people from underrepresented groups free subscriptions to its online curriculum for one year, including access to unlimited live online training courses and live virtual events such as O’Reilly’s popular Superstream Series. These users just completed their yearlong memberships, during which they consumed more than 480,000 units of content across nearly 5,000 unique resources on the O’Reilly platform.
“Part of the challenge of improving diversity across the industry is showing diverse groups that there is a place for them within the technology community,” said Laura Baldwin, president at O’Reilly. “Instead of waiting for these skilled individuals to find us, we’ve created initiatives at O’Reilly that aim to seek out talent from these underrepresented groups and provide them with a platform which supports them in sharing their valuable technical expertise and developing the skills needed to break through barriers within the field. While we’ve worked hard to bring balanced representation to the industry, we recognize that there’s still much more to do and are continually raising our goals to increase diversity both within the platform and within our workforce.”
Beyond developing initiatives to improve representation within its platform, O’Reilly also set aggressive hiring goals to build a more diverse organization. In 2021, O’Reilly aspired to bring in 40% of its new hires from underrepresented groups. The company surpassed this goal and achieved 51% representation from underrepresented communities, with women making up 44% of its workforce—well above the U.S. tech industry average of 28.8%. In 2022, O’Reilly increased its hiring goals by 20%, targeting 43% of new hires to come from diverse backgrounds. So far this year, 72% of new hires identify as members of underrepresented groups.
“Excellence Award winners distinguish themselves through their growing understanding that all the functions of HCM are integrated and must work together to move businesses forward,” said Brandon Hall Group Chief Operating Officer Rachel Cooke, leader of the HCM Excellence Awards program. “It is a pleasure to see more organizations collaborating across functions and getting more sophisticated and accomplished at delivering measurable benefit through ground-breaking HCM practices. For example, it was inspiring to see how diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are increasingly embedded into people and business strategies and cultures. We saw more alignment between HCM and business objectives than ever before.”
O’Reilly is actively hiring for a number of open positions, including roles within its customer success, data science, engineering, product management, marketing, and operations teams. For more information about open career opportunities at O’Reilly, please visit https://www.oreilly.com/careers/.
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