OneTen, a coalition of corporate executives dedicated to helping a million Black Americans secure family-sustaining careers, is working with IBM and Merck to pilot a virtual network designed to facilitate career development, job posting, and recruitment, BloombergQuint reports.

Launched in December 2020 by thirty-seven corporations, OneTen aims to hire, retain, and provide advancement opportunities for a million Black Americans without four-year college degrees over the next ten years — by building new talent pipelines, implementing a skills-first paradigm, and designing educational and employment pathways that support employees in furthering their education. The virtual network will enable employers and employees as well as upskilling and educational organizations — including Harvard Business School — to collaborate on those goals. IBM and Merck are working with Bain & Co. as well as consultant and talent management firms to develop the network, which is scheduled to be fully online in the fourth quarter of this year.

OneTen also will run programming in about twenty-five metro areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Philadelphia, each coordinated by a different member company, OneTen CEO Maurice Jones told BloombergQuint. IBM will focus on training tech hires in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area, while Merck will work in Raleigh-Durham and Philadelphia.

The fifty current OneTen member companies have approximately eight hundred and fifty thousand Black employees without college degrees. Even with the companies working to promote many of them, members will need to hire an additional five hundred thousand to reach their goal.

"We're trying to turn a fragmented system into an ecosystem," said Jones, who served as president and CEO of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation until January. "If we don't hit the scale we need, then we won't have success with this bold ambition of one million."