When Rachel Henry first joined VelocityEHS in 2019, she didn’t have a clear vision for where she was headed next in her career. She’d spent her career in customer-facing roles, but she knew that wasn’t her “happy place.”
When the company undertook an internal team realignment, Henry was able to land in that happy place — her current team of customer success strategy and operations. Her new role merged her deep customer knowledge with her interest in systems and structures.
“The changes helped me identify what I love to do and gave me opportunities to learn different tools and processes to further educate myself,” she said.
When she first joined the customer success strategy and operations team, Henry was able to utilize the expertise she had built as a customer success manager to create processes for gaps she had identified while working in her previous role. After a year and a half on the team, she was promoted to her current role as team lead. In this role, Henry guides her team as they identify, create and implement processes of their own.
“My growth at VelocityEHS has been both professionally and personally profound,” she said. “The different hats I’ve worn have helped me to develop a better sense of self. The company’s leadership has helped me understand my current and long-term goals and provided the opportunity to reach them.”
WHAT VELOCITYEHS DOES
VelocityEHS offers a platform to help organizations use predictive technology to address environmental, social and governance challenges as well as environment, health and safety issues.
Director of Service Operations Stephanie Crowell similarly credits VelocityEHS with helping her envision expansive possibilities for her own development. Her journey from joining the company as a credit analyst in 2012 to her current leadership role epitomizes the company’s ethos of nurturing talent and providing avenues for growth.
“Working at VelocityEHS has helped me to uncover my passion for leadership, operational excellence and continuous improvement and has put me in the perfect role to take advantage of these strengths,” she said. “The organization is committed to investing in its employees and there are numerous outlets I’ve used to achieve my goals and to grow: stretch projects, internal and external training, formal and informal mentorship and regular actionable feedback on goals and competencies.”
Through initiatives like the Game Changers mentorship program, which pairs employees with members of the executive team for one-on-one sessions, Crowell has continued to refine her leadership skills and expand her professional horizons. Her journey serves as a testament to VelocityEHS’ unwavering dedication to cultivating leaders who propel the organization forward.
Like his colleagues Henry and Crowell, Staff Software Developer Will Turnbull shared his appreciation for the culture of mentorship and continuous improvement that he has found since first joining the company in 2018.
“This is the first company I’ve worked at where my opportunities for growth and advancement have not reached an eventual plateau,” he said. “Working for VelocityEHS has allowed me to gain expertise working with a broad range of front-end technologies and frameworks, including those on the leading edge of modern front-end software development.”
“This is the first company I’ve worked at where my opportunities for growth and advancement have not reached an eventual plateau.”
For Turnbull, those opportunities to learn across new technologies have been supported by strong relationships with his colleagues on teams across the company. Recently, he was sent “on loan” to another new team, which offered him additional opportunities to learn.
“I’m working on delivering critical updates to the front end of our environmental health and safety software and being challenged by taking on a product and technologies less familiar to me,” he said. “I hope to continue to leverage this opportunity to grow my breadth of experience and learn from my talented new team members.”
The culture of mentorship and support is modeled by Turnbull’s managers and VelocityEHS’ leaders — practices that he has adopted while supporting others on the team, as well. The fruits of those commitments have been made clear to Turnbull not only through his own growth but also by seeing those around him advance.
“The culture of growth and career development here can be clearly seen by the large number of celebrated quarterly promotions, along with the willingness of managers to give individuals the chance to take on new challenges within their teams,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone I’ve worked with who hasn’t clearly grown or advanced in their role over time.”
Henry agreed that visibility into these promotions and successes provides more than an opportunity to celebrate with colleagues.
“The announcements show potential growth paths for our new hires and also those who have been at the company for a while,” she said. “In my case, a highlight meeting about our mentorship program pushed me to apply and recently be accepted to work and learn from our executive leadership team.”
Powering Company Growth with Individual Advancement
Of VelocityEHS’ many professional development programs, Turnbull, Henry and Crowell credit Eagles Education as invaluable for themselves and their teams. Eagles Education funds training outside VelocityEHS’ internal programming to help extend employee skills even further — like a business process improvement course Henry was able to pursue as she stepped into her operations role.
“Eagles Education provides motivated, high-achieving employees with structured opportunities for career growth and development,” Turnbull said.
As individuals advance thanks to programs like Eagles Education, the benefits across the entire company are clear.
“In the last couple of years, my team has taken Lean Six Sigma, Scrum Master, SharePoint, PowerBI and Python training, and some members have also received formal certifications as a result,” Crowell said. “Last year, we put our Lean Six Sigma training to good use, working on a shared goal to improve the efficiency of a service delivery process, resulting in cost savings of over $75,000 per year.”
This engagement and investment in growth fuels a powerful culture of continuous learning across the organization.
“Every time I see a post of another individual accomplishing a milestone it excites me and encourages me to do the same,” Henry said. “I’ve earned credentials and looked into courses I normally would have overlooked.”
“Every time I see a post of another individual accomplishing a milestone it excites me and encourages me to do the same.”
Empowering employees to take on unexpected challenges is at the core of VelocityEHS’ professional development culture, according to Crowell.
“When I started, I was shifting gears in my career and looking for an organization that would provide me with opportunities to develop myself, unlock my potential and support my career journey,” she said. I’ve gotten everything I bargained for — and then some — while consistently making positive contributions to the company. As someone who takes self-development seriously, there’s no shortage of leaders who are available to support me on my journey nor opportunities to keep me challenged and learning new skills.”
