INROADS Top 10 Strategic Partners

ST. LOUIS, Dec. 10, 2014 — INROADS, Inc., a multi-cultural non-profit specializing in leadership development and career opportunities for high potential, underserved youth, recently announced its Top 10 Strategic Partners. INROADS develops diverse, skilled talent to become Corporate America’s future business, science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) leaders.

“Studies have shown diversity drives innovation, problem-solving and profits,” said Forest Harper, President and CEO of INROADS, Inc. “INROADS Top 10 Strategic Partners recognize – and address – the need to build a sustainable pipeline of diverse talent today to ensure market leadership tomorrow.”

The Top 10 Strategic Partners are selected based on the number of INROADS internships they sponsored in 2014. They include:

1. United Technologies Corporation
2. Kaiser Permanente
3. Travelers
4. MetLife
5. General Electric Company
6. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
7. Lockheed Martin Corporation
8. PricewaterhouseCoopers
9. JCPenney
10. PepsiCo

INROADS helps leading Fortune 500 companies grow pipelines of high-potential future executives, preparing and equipping promising students – rising high school seniors, and college freshmen and sophomores – for corporate readiness with business soft skills and leadership development. Increasingly, students pursuing STEM majors are filling those pipelines.

Eighty percent of INROADS Top 10 Strategic Partners have filled at least 20 percent of their internships with STEM majors. “Since the industry’s disclosure of its lack of diversity earlier this year, reports from seven other major technology companies make one thing clear: the lack of diversity in technology is endemic,” said Harper. “As a result, demand for STEM diversity is growing; INROADS is meeting that demand.” Of the current 1,468 INROADS interns across all sponsoring companies, 39% are STEM majors, 47% are female, 47% are African American, 22% are Hispanic/Latino and 32% represent other ethnic/racial groups.

About INROADS

The Mission of INROADS is to develop and place talented underserved youth in business and industry and prepare them for corporate and community leadership.  Founded in 1970, INROADS, Inc. is the nation’s largest non-profit source of salaried corporate internships.  INROADS has placed students in over 127,000 paid internships throughout its history, providing students with the skills and competencies necessary to be successful in advanced careers, and graduated over 27,000 Alumni into full-time professional and managerial positions with over 1,000 Corporate Partners.  With over 35 offices throughout the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, INROADS has consistently been named one of “America’s Top 10 Internships” for over 15 years. Currently, INROADS serves nearly 1,500 Interns and over 230 Corporate Clients. To learn more, visit http://www.INROADS.org.