National Grid is Giving People with Disabilities Job Opportunities

For the past year, Enabling Disability Confidence – one of National Grid’s 11 employee resource groups – has been holding mentoring sessions across its US service area with one inspiring goal: to help young, talented college graduates with disabilities get the job skills they need. And maybe even get a job at National Grid.

In Melville, Long Island, on March 23, employee/mentors teamed up with 14 students in fields ranging from communications, to environmental science, to finance, for the company’s most recent Mentoring Day.

"Our main goal is to help give these young people the chance they need ... and deserve ... to shine in the work force. The Mentoring Days expose them to a corporate environment, team them up with our professionals one-on-one, and also give them general job search skills," says Long Island Enabling co-lead Mary Holzmann, who planned this event along with fellow co-lead Susan Bertrand. Human Resource's Cynthia Angulo, for example, shared interviewing tips. And Consumer Advocates Miguel Santos and Rosanne Small-Morgan (another Enabling LI co-lead) shared their diversity experiences.

Long Island's CEO, Inc. [the CEO stands for Career and Employment Options] teamed up with National Grid for the event, bringing 11 of the students for this special opportunity. (The other students came from Abilities, Inc. – the Viscardi Center.)

Brian Levine, CEO Inc.’s administrator of vocational and evaluation services, was thrilled with "this phenomenal opportunity. The students we serve want to get out in the real world and put their skills to work. We're so thankful a large, widely recognized company like National Grid would join us in this endeavor – and they have so many more job opportunities in different fields than I would have imagined!"

Enabling's EmployABILITY program looks to take things one step further – with departments hiring permanent interns. Read more about National Grid’s Employability program and mentoring days in ournationalgrid.com links below (see links within second article for all the news):

Meet National Grid’s newest Employability intern

Meet other Employability interns and see links to previous Enabling stories