Amplify Academy Diversity Council Scholarships Awarded

Written By Lars Schmidt

We’re thrilled to share we’ve awarded the first set of scholarships from the new Amplify Academy Diversity Council!

Last month the Diversity Council announced its first initiative, a scholarship program for the upcoming Golf Cohort. The scholarship program was created to broaden access to career growth and leadership development opportunities for HR and people operations leaders from underrepresented communities. 

We awarded five scholarships in total. Three full scholarships to the Golf Cohort and two additional one-year scholarships to the Amplify Academy.

Each cohort scholarship recipient will be assigned a mentor from the Diversity Council to support their onboarding into the Amplify Academy Community and help them maximize their learning and growth in the Cohort. Cohort scholarship recipients will also receive one-year access to the Amplify Academy, including the AI Learning Lab and Community. 

One note, the Diversity Council determined we won’t be sharing the scholarship recipient’s information publicly. They’re welcome to do so, of course, but we felt it’s important that they make that choice.

We can’t wait to welcome them to the Academy!

A Look Inside the Process

There were 15 applicants representing three countries and ten industries.

The Diversity Council created a six-member panel to review and assess all applicants. They modeled the 776 Operator in Residence application process that Katelin Holloway open-sourced.

The applications were stripped of identifying information before the reviews to mitigate bias.

They were each blind-scored on a 3-point rating system across the following four criteria:

  • How the applicants conveyed their interest in the program

  • How will the applicants use the learning for their own development, and how they’ll use it to share and support others

  • Applicants’ thoughts and ideas on how to advance the HR & People Operations field

  • How will the scholarship impact the applicant's career and/or development

Once the applications were reviewed and scored, the selection committee met live to discuss the ratings and make selections.

In cases where the scoring was close, they discussed the top and bottom ratings to understand the scoring context of each review council member.

They also evaluated scholarship representation equity and the immediate impact of the leadership development curriculum (i.e., most likely to be in, or close to, a Head of People role) as a tiebreaker.

Once the selections were made, we immediately notified those selected and those who were not selected immediately.

We knew this news could be disappointing. While we had a limited number of scholarships to award, we wanted to show developmental support for those not selected.

The Diversity Council curated a range of free resources, open-source collections, and communities that we feel support continued learning and growth as a progressive people practitioner.

💡 You can find the resources we shared at the bottom of this post in case they’re helpful.

What We Learned

This was the Diversity Council’s first scholarship process. We were building as we went because of the narrow window to thoughtfully design, launch, promote, assess, award, and communicate the process - mostly during the holidays.

This meant we had to move more quickly than what would have been optimal in the design and launch of the program. The review committee will have a project post-mortem soon to discuss key learnings and areas for optimization for future scholarships.

Here are a few changes we expect to implement for the next scholarship in May.

  • More lead time. We’ll launch the scholarship application at least six weeks before the cohort begins to provide ample time for promotion, applications, and reviews.

  • More scoring rubric clarity. Due to time constraints, we had to launch the application process before we had finalized the scoring rubric. That meant applicants submitted their applications without clearly understanding how they’d be assessed. Future applicants will know that upfront before applying.

  • Advice from scholarship winners. We’ll work closely with our first group of scholarship winners to understand their experience and convey their advice to future applicants.

I’m sure there will be more learnings and adjustments after our post-mortem. In the spirit of building this transparently, we wanted to share where we landed and what we learned. More to come.

This is just the start of the Diversity Council’s work. They will offer additional cohort scholarships for upcoming cohorts in May and September, and explore other ways to support practitioners from underrepresented communities throughout the year.

Congratulations to all of the scholarship recipients!

 

Here are the curated resources we shared with applicants in case you may find them helpful.

Resources & Tools & Collections

Communities

Lars Schmidt
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