NETSCOUT Showcases Partner NPower at ENGAGE 2022

NETSCOUT will be welcoming NPower to ENGAGE, our annual technology and user summit, in April 2022. NPower is one of our important nonprofit partners, creating pathways to economic prosperity by launching digital careers for military veterans and young adults from underserved communities, including those in Dallas, Texas; San Jose, California; and Detroit, Michigan—near three of our U.S. offices. This partnership supports our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) pillars to further our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and to support digital inclusion programs that help bridge the digital divide.

As NETSCOUT CEO Anil Singhal announced at last year’s ENGAGE, we are a founding member of NPower’s Command Shift Coalition. The Command Shift Coalition is a national consortium that advocates for strategies that invest in and inspire the advancement of young women of color in tech careers—with a particular focus on women from underrepresented communities and nontraditional pathways. Other coalition members include Citi, Comcast, Broadridge, Accenture, AWS, Guardian Insurance, World Wide Technology, Tata Consulting, and Vodafone.

NPower’s newly published research report, The Equation for Equality, shows that only 5 percent of tech workers in the U.S. today are Black, Latinx, or Native American women of color. The Command Shift Coalition wants to double that percentage over the next 10 years. 

“Growing up as I did in a small community in a small island nation, professional women were primarily nurses, teachers, secretaries, or bank clerks,” says Yvonne Erdogan, director of managed services at NETSCOUT and coalition subcommittee member. “Women working in the technology field was not something that was done, and today I see that in some communities this is still considered to be off-limits or intimidating.

“From an early age,” she adds, “I learned about myself and the responsibility I have to the community. NPower’s mission to move people from poverty to the middle class through tech skills training, quality job placement, and, more specifically, the Command Shift Coalition’s goal of accelerating more women of color in the technology field, allows me to be part of something great that can improve and help make a difference in someone’s life as well as my own. NETSCOUT has given me the opportunity to be a part of the team representing us in this very important coalition, which is also tasked with developing toolsets and best practices that can be brought back to help us grow and make a difference in the area of recruiting and providing opportunities for women of color and the wider community.”

“Increasing [the number of] women of color in tech jobs is critical not just as a pipeline strategy, but as an overall approach to helping underserved women of color who might not have college degrees but have stackable tech skills that can be upskilled to increase their opportunities for economic advancement through a long-term, equally compensated career in tech,” notes Candice L. Dixon, coalition development director at NPower.

“This is why we created Command Shift, to address the underrepresentation of women of color in tech,” she says. “Command Shift’s coalition of leading corporations and nonprofit organizations has committed to help double the number of women of color in tech from 5 percent today to 10 percent in 10 years, an effort grounded in the Emsi Burning Glass research. This work cannot be done alone, which is why we are grateful for the support from coalition members like NETSCOUT.”

NETSCOUT works with many social-impact programs to fulfill our mission as Guardians of the Connected World by helping to bridge the digital divide. Since 2017, NETSCOUT has worked with NPower in a variety of ways, including hiring NPower students as IT service desk interns and sponsoring NPower’s national gala, attended by our executives and sales teams.

Additionally, employees volunteer as regional advisory board members, class speakers, mock interviewers, and mentors. As a (founding) member of the Command Shift Coalition, we help create access to technology careers for underrepresented talent, especially women of color. This is important not only for the tech industry, which is facing a significant skills shortage, but for accessing these highly paid technology careers that can improve the lives of women, their entire families, and potentially the next generation. If girls of color can see it, they can be it—in the technology field.

Learn more about ENGAGE.

Learn more about NPower.