Part of the Family: This GE Aerospace Couple Helps Hispanic and Latino Employees Reach Their Full Potential

Daniel and Elsie Caratini like to say they joined GE Aerospace's Hispanic and Latino Alliance even before they accepted their offers with the company. As part of the recruiting process back in 2008, they received a phone call from the woman running the Greenville, South Carolina, hub of the employee resource group.

"When you come here, we're going to embrace you as a family," Daniel recalls her saying. "That hooked me."

"She was like, 'We'll take you to find where to buy your Latino things, so that you feel right at home,'" Elsie adds. "Everyone was very supportive."

The alliance helped the Caratinis feel welcome right away, which meant a lot, since they were far from home. Elsie and Daniel, who both grew up in Puerto Rico, knew they wanted to be engineers from an early age. They met in 1996 during freshman orientation at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, where they both studied mechanical engineering. They've been together ever since - though their first decade together was something of a whirlwind.

Daniel, who served in the U.S. Army Reserves, had to put college on hold when he was called up to active duty to support the homeland security mission following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. While Daniel was serving his country, Elsie moved to Michigan to take a job at Chrysler. While she was there, she also completed a master's degree at the University of Michigan. After a year of active duty, Daniel finished his bachelor's degree at Michigan as well, and joined Chrysler in 2004 as a design engineer. Four years later, the Caratinis, who were married in 2002, moved to Greenville to start their careers at GE Power (now GE Vernova).

Joining the Alliance

In Greenville, they quickly began contributing to the Hispanic and Latino Alliance (HLA) as official members. Soon, both led pillars for the group, developing strategies for important functions such as community outreach, employee engagement, member development, and communication.

Elsie led the "Attract, Retain and Develop" initiative, which focused on increasing membership while investing time and resources to preserve and grow talent in the company. She also led recruiting efforts, mentoring programs, Spanish classes for employees, and "tech talks" for college students - "you name it, everything related to improving our members and the community," she says.

Daniel also started volunteering and became very active in the HLA and the community as well. Eventually he became a hub leader of the HLA, then global operating leader from 2021 until earlier this year. He helped form a national operating team and deepened the company's partnership with the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) by serving as executive sponsor.

"For many years, the operating team was thinking about how we could become more inclusive as an organization and bring others along on that journey," Daniel says. "We modeled a more inclusive organization by bringing non-Hispanics into our global operating team. This way we were able to scale our impact through having more allies."

Along the way, the Caratinis spent two years in Schenectady, New York, where Daniel worked for GE Research and Elsie worked for GE Renewable Energy (now GE Vernova). Then, in 2018, they moved to Cincinnati to join GE Aerospace, where today Daniel is executive director for value engineering and Elsie is an executive engineering design section leader - both within the Defense and Systems division.

Helping Others Overcome Challenges

Mentoring and recruiting are two of the Caratinis' favorite activities at GE Aerospace. "We both get approached by employees and early-career individuals," Elsie says. "They see how we've been able to grow in our careers, and it's been very rewarding to give back to other people and share what we've learned."

They've also chosen to give back to Puerto Rico, where they travel for recruiting and to speak with high school students about STEM careers. In Cincinnati, Elsie has helped translate for Spanish-speaking parents at school conferences and has volunteered with the GE Aerospace Foundation's Next Engineers college readiness program, speaking about STEM opportunities to students at the University of Cincinnati. She and Daniel also have involved their sons, now 13 and 15, in their community work.

Both say their involvement in the Hispanic and Latino Alliance has helped them become better colleagues and leaders. "Ultimately, we're all people," Daniel says, "and we need to meet our goals together. The best way we can do that is understanding the challenges that somebody else might go through on a day-to-day basis and thinking about how we help each other to overcome those challenges."

He notes that he's always trying to learn more himself. "A good example can be, in conversations, somebody may use a word I've never heard before and I'll ask, 'What do you mean by that?'" he says. "It's just a language barrier, and it's never been a major issue, but it's one I'm always trying to improve on."

Daniel adds: "To me, the ability to work most effectively will come as you have an environment where you can understand and give merit to cultural differences, and be included in solving some of the challenges around cultural differences."

Elsie agrees. "As leaders, it's important to be outside of the office and the conference rooms, walking through the halls and talking to people," she says. "You are opening space for unity by caring for people who are going through different experiences or coming from different backgrounds. The awareness of what people need to be successful and how the organization can support them relates closely to inclusivity."