Supporting career development and talent retention through mentorship opportunities at all experience levels.
Professional development for all – meet our multi-generational employee resource group
Alexander Wolfgang Schneider was 19 and a newly certified aircraft mechanic at a repair shop in South Florida.
What he needed was a mentor. What he got, he recalls, was a co-worker who didn’t take him seriously – loudly asking whether he knew which tools to use and giving him grief if he felt he was taking too long to write a report.
“I would spend more time within my thoughts, frozen, instead of being focused on the task,” said Schneider, a senior principal engineer at Pratt & Whitney, an RTX business. “In some cases, I’d have to stop, pause and start over. It was challenging for me to gain acceptance and acknowledgement that I could bring something to the table.”
He has never forgotten how it felt. Now, as the global chair of RTX NXGEN, the company’s employee resource group for people of multiple generations, Schneider is making sure his co-workers have the support he looked for early in his career.
Professional support at every level
RTX Next Generation Professionals, also called RTX NXGEN, is the company’s multi-generational employee resource group. As part of the company’s commitment to strengthening inclusion and creating equitable opportunities for employees, the group’s major objectives include:
Partnering with the company to create a new toolkit about age diversity in the workplace.
Hosting on-site networking and learning events to promote professional development and build connections.
Listening and delivering
A new toolkit focused on age diversity in the workplace is one of several initiatives RTX NXGEN is focused on this year. The resource is designed to support employee retention and the career development of its membership, which rose 33 percent in 2023 and includes employees of all experience levels and ages.
With pages full of discussion prompts and guides, activity outlines and worksheets, the toolkit is part of the group’s mission to help employees know their worth at any age or experience level.
“I think we do have a company culture where people are understanding, and leaders give employees chances to succeed, to fail, and to be challenged,” said Schneider. “The effort is to make sure we are doing our best to be aware of age and experience bias and to be more intentional about not letting it sway our decisions.”
“I think we do have a company culture where people are understanding, and leaders give employees chances to succeed, to fail, and to be challenged.”
Alexander Wolfgang Schneider | Global chair | RTX NXGEN
The power of mentorship
RTX NXGEN also promotes mentorship to help employees develop professionally. Those efforts include a yearly “mentorship raffle” that pairs members with executive-level mentors. The group also partners with RTX VETS, the company’s employee resource group for the armed services community, on its new companywide mentorship program for employees of any level, VAALOR (Veterans and Allies Advancing Leadership, Outreach, and Resilience).
Schneider and RTX NXGEN ERG global co-chair Shawna Burkhardt are among more than 85 RTX NXGEN members who registered for VAALOR’s first cohort in April 2024, out of 373 participants companywide. The program connects each participant to a mentor one or two job levels above them, and a mentee one or two job levels below them.
“In order to develop, you have to connect with people,” said Burkhardt, a senior program manager in RTX Enterprise Services. “Mentoring is one way to expand an individual’s network and grow in relationships. That’s really what NXGEN is all about.”
“In order to develop, you have to connect with people. Mentoring is one way to expand an individual’s network and grow in relationships. That’s really what NXGEN is all about.”
Shawna Burkhardt | Global co-chair | RTX NXGEN
Leading from experience
Schneider remembers thinking the comments and treatment he experienced in his first job were “just the way it is.”
“Now, I look back and I go, ‘No, that wasn’t right,’” he said. “Thankfully I learned that I did have champions who respected my abilities, and I discovered that there was more I could personally do to speak up appropriately to diffuse the situation. That’s what sticks with me today. All of that led to me being passionate about this.”
And those experiences motivate him to support RTX in building a new set of tools for employees to not only handle workplace challenges – but grow from them.
