We started mentoring 5 Masters students from Queen Mary Business School on their Capstone Thesis assignment in January 2024. As sustainable recruiters, we know the Financial Services industry is severely underrepresented across DEI and socio-economic backgrounds. We tasked them to investigate how to transition experienced skill sets into ESG in FS. Graduate programs are assisting at the junior level, but Senior management and C suites are lacking diversity. Looking at identifying the gap in the industry and then finding the ‘how’ and ‘what’ is being done to assist it now. 

To implement a truly sustainable 'people' path including DEI. 

The questions we set for their thesis topics:

1. How to demystify financial services from the roots (DEI and socio-economic). (To ensure more applicants from diverse backgrounds apply).
2. How can we get F.S. firms to be open to the transition of skills from other professional sectors to financial services? Thus Increasing diversity at the senior/ board level (without encouraging talent wars).
3. What changes in the recruitment process need to occur, to be more inclusive across socio-economic barriers. So what measures can be introduced to understand the applicant's socio-economic background in the application process?
4. What needs to be put into place to support these individuals once hired within the firms? How should companies address onboarding DEI backgrounds (across skill levels).
5. Where does DEI/socio-economic selection stop and cognitive diversity take over?

We are incredibly grateful to the market participants who offered their time and knowledge to be interviewed from a personal and business perspective around DEI in Financial Services. This guided the students and showed first-hand how practical knowledge and insight can help students learn and grow so much more than just theory.

Please let us know if you would like to review their research, the students are happy to share their research to aid DEI and the industry.

We asked the students for their feedback on the research they did and their initial impression of the Financial services world. As well as their first outlook on Diversity when they arrived in the UK, highlights of the Capstone project, what they learnt working with Farrell Associates and most importantly what they learnt from their DEI topic for their thesis.

Below is some feedback from the students:

Rola's thoughts on the DEI topic and experience.

Mayank's thoughts on the DEI topic and experience.

Hemant's thoughts on the DEI topic and experience.

Aleyna's thoughts on DEI topic and experience.pdf

From our perspective, we loved working with the students, they are all exceptionally bright and talented and their growth from our first meeting to their final presentation was incredible! We had gone into this programme to unlock industry solutions around DEI, but the actual impact on each student's growth and learning was where the direct impact was of helping a set of diverse students.