Asana partners with The Marcy Lab School to prepare students from diverse backgrounds for purpose-driven careers in tech

Building and sustaining a diverse and inclusive culture is a long-game strategy that requires commitment. We make progress one small step at a time, and it takes every employee to help create a diverse and inclusive workforce. Achieving our mission to help humanity thrive by enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly requires building an inclusive product. One way we do this is through our programs like AsanaUP and meaningful partnerships that allow us to invest and create change in communities that have been systematically disenfranchised.

We are thrilled to announce our partnership with The Marcy Lab School, an organization focused on helping young professionals accelerate their careers. This yearlong college alternative provides young adults from underrepresented backgrounds with the skills, habits, and network to launch a rewarding, purpose-driven career in tech. 

The Marcy Lab School is thrilled to partner with Asana. Asana has explicitly committed to developing the future generation of tech leaders and to increasing access to life-changing career opportunities within its organization for people from all educational and career backgrounds. By working alongside Asana engineers and product leaders through a series of workshops, mentorship opportunities, and interviews, Marcy Lab School Fellows have already become more prepared to launch their careers in tech. We are looking forward to building a lasting partnership with Asana and for our Fellows to continue working alongside, or even joining, the Asana team.”

The Marcy Lab School program prepares high-achieving young adults from diverse backgrounds for full-time careers in software engineering. Learn more about this exciting partnership and hear from Enmanual de la Nuez, a current Asana apprentice who went through the program.

A partnership to create opportunities for success

Together with The Marcy Lab School, our goal is to improve and diversify Asana’s software engineering pipeline and drive better outcomes for Marcy Lab Fellows. Our partnership with The Marcy Lab School is another step towards bridging the gap for aspiring Black and Latinx engineers coming from underserved backgrounds. We’re excited to partner with The Marcy Lab School to develop a curriculum that allows Fellows to apply for engineering apprentice positions at Asana and other industry-leading companies, and create opportunities for students to be mentored by Asanas. 

We are particularly excited about the ambitious, mindful, intelligent Fellows that the Asana Engineering Team will have the opportunity to support. This will be done through 1:1 mentorship, technical workshops, and career building opportunities. These connections are important for both Asana employees and Marcy Lab students as they provide Asana employees with experience mentoring diverse candidates and are essential for the professional development of our Fellows. We’ll also have the Fellows engage with our employee resource groups, Blacsana and Gradient, for additional mentorship and support. 

Ultimately we’re enabling and preparing these fellows so they have the best chance to succeed in the tech world.

Supporting underrepresented minorities so they can thrive in tech 

Asana is focused on helping support underrepresented minorities in the tech world through a variety of programs. The Marcy Lab School joins our growing diversity of partner programs alongside Grace Hopper Conference, TechInclusion, Latinas in Tech, Lesbians Who Tech, Latinx Summit, Women in Product, Code2040 Tech Trek, Tapia, Out4Undergrad, and Techqueria, a nonprofit whose mission is to provide Latinx professionals with the resources and support they need to thrive and become leaders in tech.

We’re excited to leverage one of our core Asana values, co-creation, to build a partnership based on the foundation of growth and inclusion. Over the past three years, Asana has been creating opportunities for aspiring engineers from non-traditional technical backgrounds to transition into a career in engineering through our AsanaUP Apprenticeship Program.”

Our apprenticeship program, AsanaUP, provides a pathway to software engineering roles at Asana for individuals with non-traditional technical backgrounds. The program equips individuals with industry experience building, testing, and implementing software projects—with an emphasis on mentorship and feedback. Most importantly, AsanaUP helps ensure that we practice inclusive hiring processes that engage candidates with diverse backgrounds.

Year Up, which is a part of AsanaUP, helps provide a funnel for non-technical AsanaUP opportunities. Year Up offers a one-year, intensive training program that provides young adults with a combination of hands-on skills development, coursework eligible for college credit, and internships at top companies. Students who are accepted into the program spend six months in Year Up functional training that prepares them for placement in a six month internship at the matched company with the goal of converting to full-time employment upon graduation. Asana has recently converted three Year Up interns to full time opportunities within our User Operations, People Operations, and Security teams.

By investing in partnerships and apprenticeship programs, we are committed to continue moving the needle on creating inclusive communities.

Meet Enmanuel de la Nuez who shares his experience from The Marcy Lab School 

Enmanuel is an Apprentice Product Engineer at Asana who graduated from The Marcy Lab School. He shared that The Marcy Lab School was different from anything he’d ever experienced before. The curriculum pushed him to build strong technical foundations and be curious, while the leadership development opportunities allowed him to build up the confidence to fail and get back up.

“The biggest highlight of my time at Marcy Lab was how humbling and inspiring it was to build relationships with my peers. Marcy Lab fellows are creative, disciplined, and ambitious leaders seeking to better the world around them. I know I have a community to lean on and grow with for a very long time. At Marcy, we always asked ourselves: How can we help others with the new tech skills in our tool belt? This question impacted the types of companies I wanted to work for. When I learned about Asana’s mission to help the world thrive by enabling teams, I was thrilled.” 

Enmanuel’s best advice for pursuing a career in software engineering is to “immerse yourself in the space and let your curiosity run wild. Immersion can mean picking up books about a technology you’re excited about, reading different programming newsletters, or watching online videos about CS.” Actively engaging with resources and communities in the space helps him build context that makes it easier to learn new things.

Learn more about The Marcy Lab School 

This partnership with The Marcy Lab School is part of our continued commitment to support underrepresented minorities in tech. Learn more about The Marcy Lab School and our early career programs at Asana.