Alexandra Bryant-Boose, a 27-year-old employee at Merck joined the latest episode of the Gen Z in Manufacturing Podcast to discuss her career as a manufacturing automation engineer, where her duties include preparing equipment for production, making coding updates to improve processes and troubleshooting daily issues.
Bryant-Boose also serves as a talent acquisition lead for Merck’s League of Employees of African Descent and co-leads a program that educates students about careers in STEM. Bryant-Boose was also recently named an Emerging Leader in manufacturing by the Manufacturing Institute’s 2024 Women MAKE Awards.
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In the episode, Bryant-Boose discussed navigating a predominantly white male industry and mentioned Merck's methods for promoting diversity, including an employee resource group for workers of African descent.
However, Bryant-Boose noted that a company's lack of diversity is not always their fault.
"A lack of diversity isn't necessarily on the company, but more so the fact that there's just not a lot of people going into these fields," Bryant-Boose said. "Taking it back to undergrad, out of a class of 100 of us, there would be maybe 20 women. If we look at the number of Black individuals or minorities, the number would be even less. I just don't think that there's a lot to work with when it comes to candidate pools."
Merck's League of Employees of African Descent gives Bryant-Boose the opportunity to promote STEM careers in an attempt to influence and diversify the future workforce. The group also gives her the chance to reverse mentor executive team members.
"The mentor I had, she was an associate director at a different site," Bryant-Boose said. "When me and her would talk, it would be me bouncing ideas off about situations that I'm going through. But also her just learning how I've been developing my own career and what tools she can take even having 15-plus years of experience on me to help with her career."
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