ICAEW's Black Talent Action Plan provides a model for improving Black representation and career progression in accountancy and the wider finance profession.
The Charter for Black Talent in Finance and the Professions, which launched in October 2020, brings a rigorous approach to improving Black representation and career progression within firms. It aims to boost recruitment, career progression, retention and promotion of Black talent in the finance and professional services sectors.
The Core Commitment of the Charter is to establish an action plan with targets to improve representation of Black talent in the UK business. However, the spirit of the Charter is to achieve change more broadly across Finance and the professions. As such, ICAEW is taking a leading role in improving representation across the profession and has developed a plan to support this. This has been praised by the founders of the Charter and serves as a model for how action plans could be considered by others.
The plan outlines actions and targets across four different areas:
- Representation amongst employees;
- Representation within the membership;
- Representation on ICAEW’s committees and advisory groups; and
- Access to the profession
ICAEW has already started work to deliver on the objectives of the plan such as creating a Black members community, and committing to the 10,000 Black Interns programme.
This action plan is one example of ICAEW’s work to improve diversity and inclusion in the profession. To find out more visit ICAEW’s D&I hub.
