I work for a gas supplier company and we are currently recruiting for 2 graduate positions. They would mainly work in finance and business analysis areas. I would like to put together a structured training programme for the first 2 years of the graduates' employment. Does anyone has a written programme that I could use as a template and also to bounce ideas off from? This is very new to me and although I have one or two ideas I would like to hear how the more experienced do it. Many thanks for any help in advance. Zsuzsanna
4 Responses
Professional institutes
Talk to your appropriate professional institute – they would have a number of templates available to help engineers achieve there appropriate I or CEng status
Mike
Graduate Development Programme
Hi Zsuzsanna,
One place to begin is by considering what the company wants a successful employee finishing a graduate programme to be able to do. I often group these skills into three categories – technical, commercial and personal excellence. You could then carry out a gaps analysis from the skills a graduate typically brings to the company on day 1 and the skills you want them to possess two-years time. This will provide a basic understanding of what your programme should deliver.
I would be happy to offer further guidance to you on this and to advice on on typical components and structure of graduate development programmes. (I have designed and developed graduate programmes for around 5 years.) Please feel free to drop me an email [email protected].
Kind regards
Fiona Goût
Graduate Training Programme
Hi Zsuzsi
As well as asking the business what they want from the graduates during, and at the end of years 1 and 2, you could also ask those currently at that level what they wished they had known / done / been aware of / been able to do / understood etc earlier.
Really succesful programmes I’ve seen, make good use of buddy system with someone a year or two ahead of them usually in the same department and with specific discussions set up with other departments. With 2 graduates, you are not going to be running lots of face-to-face programmes, so they will need opportunities to meet colleagues and managers in different situations.
I have found some trainee programmes build up lots of technical expertise early on, which is essential, and leaves lots of the non-technical training until later. As a simple example, the management team is in a meeting and the “junior” person is left to answer the phone, telling them to interrupt if it is really urgent – are they allowed to transfer calls to anothe department and do they know how to?; they aren’t sure how to take messages and what information to keep – should the messages be on special forms or sent by email? they aren’t really sure who does what so don’t know who to pass messages onto; no-one defines “urgent”. Then they get a slightly irritated person on the phone and are very unsure how to deal with them.
Off soapbox now! Good luck
Sue
Qualifications
Whenever I have had Finance trainees I have required them to start their professional qualfication (ACCA or CIMA) immediately and one of the measures was successful completion of each of the levels. Therefore as part of the training programme we identified the study method, time off for revision, how we would handle someone failing an exam/retakes, etc. Simlarly with commercial trainees, I have agreed with the business an appropriate professional qualification – marketing, purchasing, etc. and that has been written into their programme.
With regards to general skills, you need to agree with the business what format the programme will take e.g. will it based on 3 or 4 job rotations/projects. You also need to agree what are the key generic competencies for success and provide training and development to support those.
Hope this helps.