Mark This! is a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark’s varied lines of business. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them--building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
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Mark This! Podcast, Episode 28: Fast Track to Leadership
Host: Heather Dotchel (she/her), Corporate Communications
It's time to Mark This! A podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's Communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
Aramark fosters leadership from numerous pathways, but one of our most appreciated is our work with young professionals in our Step Up to leadership program, known as S2L, and our Accelerate to Leadership program, known as A2L. Step Up to Leadership, S2L, is our paid summer internship program that provides underclassmen exposure to impactful work and dynamic responsibilities. Students have the unique opportunity to work alongside leaders to learn the ins and outs of their site's operations, receive the support necessary to build their resume, and gain a solid foundation for a promising career.
Accelerate to Leadership, A2L, is designed for recent college graduates to unleash their full potential and launch an accelerated career path to a leadership role within Aramark. With meaningful hands-on work and projects, this program offers flexibility and a powerful commitment to professional development in hospitality management, corporate and functional support, facilities management, and culinary management.
Joining us today are Melanie Hunter, Casie Coxson, and Marcus Powell. Melanie is an Early Career Talent Acquisition Manager here at Aramark, and Casie and Marcus are current employees who both graduated from A2L. Let's start with some introductions. Melanie, can you tell us more about your role at Aramark and how did you land yourself in a career in recruiting and developing early career professionals?
Absolutely. Hi, Heather, and hi everyone. My name is Melanie Hunter, and as Heather mentioned, I am the Early Career Talent Acquisition Manager here at Aramark. So, really what that means is that I have the awesome job of getting to lead a team of amazing recruiters who help students every day launch that first career here at Aramark.
So really, honestly, when I was thinking about coming on the podcast today, I was starting to reflect back on my career in early career recruiting. I've been in the early career recruiting space for almost 12 years, and I've had the awesome opportunity to work at really cool companies. And in each of these roles, my main focus was helping students that I met on college campuses really get that first career, either as an intern or as a full-time employee in a leadership development program. So really, this is my life's passion. I love helping students make that connection from their college campuses to that first role out of college.
Fantastic. So Casie and Marcus, let's learn a little bit more about you. Marcus, let's start with you. Can you share a little bit about yourself, your career journey at Aramark so far, dating all the way back to the A2L program, and where you are in your career now?
Absolutely. So starting with where I am now, so again, my name is Marcus Powell and I'm a senior HR manager for Aramark's Sports and Entertainment line of business, specifically for the D.C., Baltimore, Northern Virginia district. I started in, or with Aramark rather, in 2017, which is crazy to think about, as a little baby A2L on the Compliance team. So back then the sector was called Sports Corrections, Leisure, Dining, and K-12. So I oversaw, with the help of course, my manager pretty much all of the compliance initiatives for the sector. I worked right alongside the VP of compliance for the sector, which was very fun and interesting, right at headquarters.
And I think the great thing about that is I was able to get a lot of connections right there. So I met the president of S&E and all these different lines of businesses. I actually got to go into the C-suite and actually meet with the chief human resource officer at the time. So, I think that was the great part about being at headquarters, is that you're right there with all of those people and get to make those connections.
In my role, again, like I mentioned, worked on a lot of compliance initiatives, from wage an hour to alcohol compliance, as well as nonprofit organization compliance for our fundraising program, specifically for the Sports and Entertainment line of business. And I think that helped me get a lot of exposure to my interest and passion in the Sports and Entertainment line of business, which ultimately led to, upon the conclusion of my program, for one, supporting different sports and entertainment events. So from Super Bowl LII, to the Traveler's Championship, to the US Open.
And then that ultimately led me to becoming the assistant manager HR manager at a huge sports and entertainment venue in D.C., which is where I was born and raised and wanted to move back to. Quickly got promoted to the HR manager position at the same arena as well, and then ultimately led me to my current role, which is the senior HR manager for the entire district. So, a pretty standard career progression, at least in the HR realm. Super excited to be here and talking through that with you guys this morning.
Thank you for sharing that. Casie, let's hear about your early days with A2L as well, and your subsequent path at Aramark.
Yeah, absolutely. So, starting with my current role, I am our Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development, which means that I do some internal training consulting for all of our lines of business, as well as I support the design and development and facilitation of many of our leadership development programs here at Aramark.
But taking it back to the beginning, my career journey with Aramark actually starts before joining the A2L program. I was a student worker while I was attending Florida State University for undergrad. And so I got a job as a barista at a Starbucks on FSU's campus. And what I anticipated to be a job to make ends meet while going to school, ended up being the start of my career, and I didn't realize it.
So by the time I was graduating from FSU, I was the store manager at that Starbucks and I had no idea what I wanted to do next in my career. All I knew is that I wanted to live somewhere outside of Florida, 'cause I was born and raised in Florida, so I was ready for a change. And so I went to a career fair on campus, and Aramark had a booth, and my HR manager at the time was like, "Casie, are you graduating? What are you looking to do?" And I told her a little bit about what I was interested in, and she's like, "Have you heard of the A2L program?" I'm like, "I have not." And so she told me all about it and it was exactly what I was looking for.
And so I had the opportunity then to relocate. This program gave me the opportunity to relocate from Florida, which is something I was really excited to do, and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, and I switched lines of business. So I went from our Collegiate Hospitality line of business to Workplace Experience group, and I became a retail manager in that line of business. And I really, really enjoyed my time there. So much so, that even after I graduated the program, I ended up staying at that account for a few more years, I was promoted to a food service director.
And then when COVID hit, everything changed. I think it kind of shook all of us worldview-wise, as well as just career, ambition, and what's next. I think, at least I can speak from my experience, but I think a lot of us can resonate with that, there was that period of time of, "Okay, what's next?" And I decided to shake things up and relocate to the Philadelphia area to go to grad school, and I decided to pursue a Master's of Leadership Development from Penn State University.
And so I relocated to Philly and I eventually had the opportunity to work at Aramark headquarters, and I've worn a few different hats since I've been with Aramark's headquarters team. But the first role was service excellence manager, where I got to support all lines of business with hospitality training, which was so incredible, and it really helped to hone in on my skills in the training and learning space.
And so then from there, I transitioned into the HR world by moving into a change management role. I was a senior consultant in change management, which was kind of a unique pathway, but I know, Marcus, you were sharing that your path was a little bit more linear, and mine was certainly not. I was kind of jumping around to different things 'cause I really wanted to learn as much as I could and leverage as many of my strengths as I could.
And so working in the change management space allowed me to work closer with our finance and our supply chain lines of business and rolling out a new procured to pay system, as well as rolling out our new global HR system. And so that took my perspective from US-focused for the enterprise to a global lens. And so then I've gotten to step into my current role on our learning and development team and be able to sort of apply the culmination of all the different experiences that I had that brought me to where I am today. So, I have had a pretty lengthy journey here with Aramark, a total of nine years, and I'm grateful for every bit of it.
Excellent. Marcus, just a quick follow up. How did you learn about Aramark and the A2L program?
Yeah, as a student in Philadelphia, Aramark is very much involved in the community there, especially as well as at my university. So Aramark actually came to many different career opportunities and job fairs, things of that sort at my university.
Interestingly enough, even though that was the case, I actually learned about the A2L program not from actually attending one of those events from one of my peers at the time who had applied. And because she applied, and of course it's a senior year and everyone's looking for a job, I said, "Yeah, let me apply as well." So, I was very fortunate that I applied and got the position.
Melanie, I'd like to turn back to you a little bit here. Why is it important for Aramark to invest in recruiting and developing early career talent through these programs?
Yeah. Well, as you could just hear from Marcus and Casie's career path, those are really just two unique paths that S2L and A2L program graduates have taken here at Aramark. Aramark has had a really long-standing history of recruiting college students into early career programs. And really many of our best leaders today, we all work with them, have grown up through a type of a leadership development program here, like the S2L and A2L program.
Many leaders will tell you that growing our people is the number one strategy to grow our company. So, we have full commitment from our leadership team to continue to invest in these programs and investing in talent. So it's really awesome to see our leaders want to get involved too. So, our senior leader team has come to lots of different events that we've hosted for our S2Ls and our A2Ls. This year alone, we've had the COO come and talk at their orientation, we've had the CFO come and do a talk, and even just last week, we had the CHRO come and have lunch with our Philly area A2Ls. So, they're really wanting to get involved with the program and wanting to give the program participants exposure to the leadership team here at Aramark.
What types of students do you target for the S2L and A2L program?
Yeah, so the S2L and A2L program nationwide, because we cover mostly North America, but we are expanding to Canada. I think this year we have our first A2L in Canada, which we're really excited about. So, around in the summertime, we go out to all of our different lines of businesses, which is unique about our team because we cover all of the different lines of businesses, and we've asked them, "Who would like to have S2Ls and A2Ls next summer?" So this is really a long process from conception of getting a request for an A2L and and S2L, to be hired a whole year later.
So this year, we received about 150 requests from all the different accounts across the country, and it's probably the best to categorize them into five different categories. So, we get requests for culinary talent, food service managers, facilities management for hospitality and lodging roles, as well as more functional corporate roles like your HR, let's see, supply chain, marketing, and everything like that.
So, those are the types of roles we recruit for, but we also are really looking for those soft skills from students, so we really hope that students can find themselves in at least one of these tracks. But really, what we're looking for is a strong work ethic and a willingness to learn. A lot of our A2Ls are in environments that could be challenging. You may be an A2L graduating from college and managing a team of 5 to 10 student workers or workers who've been with the company for a long time. So, we really look for people that can be adaptable, have really great communication skills.
And of course, because of the title of our Accelerate to Leadership program and our Step Up to Leadership program, we also look for people that are passionate about helping people and furthering their leadership skills. So, we talk to students on campus, we really look for students who have been involved in a leadership capacity, either helping to manage a group project, helping on campus as a student leader for an organization, or even we've talked to students themselves who have built their own businesses. So we really love to hear from people that have had leadership experience and then are looking to grow that experience through our programs.
Marcus, can you give us an example of a memorable moment or accomplishment that you had in A2L and/or your career post-graduation from that program?
Yeah. I remember being super excited being able to support Super Bowl LII for a couple of reasons, because at the time when I was living in Philadelphia, so that was the year that the Eagles won, so I was super proud about that, but it just was an amazing experience to be a part of. And especially going into I guess my postgraduate career, I didn't know what that would look like. So to be within a year of working post-grad and being able to support Super Bowl LII, that was just an amazing feat for myself.
From alcohol and compliance, of course, to HR, logistics, and things of that nature, it's definitely something, of course, I've added to my resume, and just still feel super proud that I was able to assist and support in that. And I think that that opportunity has led to me being, one, selected for many other opportunities, but just being able to meet a lot of different people within Aramark and just continue my career track and just growth with Aramark. So I was super passionate about that role, or about that opportunity, rather.
Well, as a Philadelphian, I do feel the need to say go Birds. Casie, let's ask you the same question. What would be your most memorable moment from the program and then any other highlight from your postgraduate career that you'd like to highlight?
Yeah, it's hard to pick just one memorable moment, but something that I often think back on because of how much it ended up influencing my career, was while I was in the A2L program, I was nominated by our vice president of operations to be a service excellence champion. And at the time, our headquarters team was looking for regional champions that would be able to train on delivering hospitality training and then be able to facilitate that training in a regional capacity.
And so I was nominated, I was selected, and I was the only A2L who was selected. I was actually even the only person at my career level who was selected. Most people were general managers or DMs or they were in pretty senior roles. And I remember thinking back to myself, 'cause I was actually flown out to headquarters, it was my first time visiting Philadelphia, first time going to headquarters, and doing this training and looking around the room and I'm like, "Did they know what they were nominating me for? Was this an accident?"
But it wasn't. I was very intentionally brought into that, and I unknowingly was setting the stage for me to become a service excellence manager when I joined our headquarters team four years later. So, I became the service excellence champion. I got to facilitate some of that content regionally. And then a few years later, after being a food service director and going to grad school and then relocating to Philly and joining the headquarters team, that was my first headquarters role, was service excellence manager. And I got to do that training, that hospitality training across all of our lines of business, and that was my full-time job. And so little did I know, in my A2L program, that experience was going to set the stage for how my career was going to continue to grow at Aramark. So, that is one thing that I always think back on as a highlight from my A2L journey and a highlight of my career overall.
But then more recently, actually, I want to share from last week, we rolled out a brand new leadership development program to the enterprise, and this program was designed internally by our internal L&D team and was facilitated internally. And we haven't had leadership development programming like that for the enterprise since pre-COVID. And so bringing this back to the enterprise has been a huge, huge accomplishment for me and my team. We're absolutely thrilled about it. We had a cohort of 30 people across all lines of business and different functional roles come to headquarters to do two full days of leadership development programming, and then now their program will continue for the next seven weeks. And so that's been a huge milestone for us 'cause we've been working on designing these programs for months. So seeing it come to life has been incredibly rewarding.
Love that, and love seeing how quickly your careers have progressed coming out of the A2L program. I know you said it's been a while, it's been nine years, but really, given the breadth of what you've done and the amount of promotions, and Marcus, you going from the A2L program and now overseeing a really large region, that's extraordinary.
Want to know more about Aramark's S2L and A2L programs? Visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information, including our early career website. I'd like to thank Melanie, Casie and Marcus for joining us. And I'd also like to thank our Mark This! listeners.
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