What skills do you need for a DEI Job?
By: Sarah Cordivano
Tags: Career Development, Diversity, Professional Development, Diversity And Inclusion, Skills Development

Communication

The ability to communicate the work you are doing including both basic and complex DEI concepts to your colleagues and stakeholders is really important. This is especially true because the people you work with will have a very wide range of understandings of DEI, so it’s important to be able to find a way to communicate successfully to everyone no matter where they are coming from. Also it’s very important to be able to present various arguments about why DEI is or should be a priority — different people are convinced in different ways.

How to build this skill? Try to write explanations of different DEI concepts or practice explaining concepts to friends and family. As inspiration, find resources online that successfully communicate in easily understandable ways. Remember, your audience members do not have PhDs in gender studies or intercultural communication, you need to make these topics accessible.

Project Management

Your DEI strategy is not valuable unless you can deliver on its commitments. In order to deliver, you need clear project management skills. This includes the ability to break a project into definable and measurable tasks and track it’s progress to completion. It also is very important that your stakeholders are actively engaged in your projects and have transparency on the status.

How to build this skill: find a project manager you work with and simply ask them to tell you about their work and the challenges they face. Also try out different project management tools (such as Trello or Asana) to find what works for you.

Stakeholder Management

A lot of DEI work is herding cats… getting people across your organization in different roles (HR, Communications, Technology, Legal, Corporate Social Responsibility, ERG organizers) to compromise and work together. In general, it’s all about finding a solution that is a win (or a perceived win) for everyone. This involves a lot of delicate stakeholder management, smoothing over misunderstandings and trying to create moments of empathy across differences. You have to get people on board with your work and often times this is best done by fully understanding their own motivations.

How to build this skill: This is a tough one to build, because you really learn this in practice and by making mistakes (and then learning from them). But before you kick off a project, make a stakeholder map with three categories:

Collaborative (stakeholders who are integral to the success of the project) Consultative (stakeholders who should be invited to provide their insight and feedback) Informative (stakeholders who need to be informed and aware of the project)

As you move ahead with your project and are keeping your stakeholders engaged, ask for feedback on whether they feel suffiencnly engaged and informed and build on this feedback.

DEI best practices

It’s important to know DEI best practices, to read and get inspired by others in the industry (here’s a Twitter list of great people to follow). But it’s impossible to know every right answer for every situation. A more important skill is to know how to find the right answer. You will get questions all the time about complex topics (accessibility, gender identity, religious inclusion, you name it!) You will need to know how to research these topics and synthesize information from various sources. Remember to consult external and internal experts as well.

How to build this skill: Research some sample topics (What to include in a gender transitioning guideline for your workplace? What are important considerations when setting up prayer rooms?). Try to find a variety of sources and experts to provide guidance.

Self Care and Boundaries

DEI is different from almost any other professional field. Every DEI topic (such as accessibility or sexuality) is deeply personal and meaningful to someone. You will not be able to fix every problem. Your organization will fail and you will fail to meet the needs of someone, sometime. It will happen. Try to learn from these experiences and move on. Try not to internalize too much of this. It’s hard to shut off after work and find perspective, but you need to actively make this a priority or you will burn out.

How to build this skill: Take your mental health and self care seriously. Try to understand what is under your control and within the scope of your role and what is not. Try to develop the awareness to know when you need a break.