Training and Development

Duration: Up to 6 months

Your graduates will be arriving straight out of university and be unfamiliar with most if not all aspects of corporate life. Their well-being needs to be managed, lines of communication, mentoring, and reporting set up and key skills gaps need to be identified and plugged.

Whilst some of the options are listed below, the end result will be customised around your particular training needs.

The key themes of onboarding and acclimatisation are designed to help a new graduate:

• Acquire the key skills, behaviours, and capabilities to successfully develop into their role specifically, and the workplace generally.
• Benefit from a flexible option to begin their journey to professional registration, with courses mapped against the UK-Spec.
• Meet their personal and professional career aspirations as outlined in your organisation's development plans, meaning that your cohort will begin by building on strong foundations.
• Gain and share knowledge and best practice in classes targeted specifically to graduate and organisational needs, facilitated by expert trainers who speak their language.
• Benefit from community discussions, facilitator support, optional coaching and establish clear expectations, especially around DE&I, culture and values, and positive Mental Health.

By the end of their first 6 months, graduates new to the business should feel much more confident in their new role, have a clear understanding of their personal and professional development pathways, and a good understanding of the programme and benefits. They will discover how their learning and development will be supported and how it fits into their role now, and in the long term.

Duration: Up to 6 months

The important thing to note about this stage is that you’ve now set a strong foundation, clear expectations and there is support in place.

Skill development includes innovation and problem solving, personality profiling, negotiation skills, Lean & Sigma toolkit, sustainability, Finance Fundamentals, preparing engineering specs, technical presentations, and design principles.

The key themes of Foundational Skills and Commercial Awareness are designed to help a new graduate:

• Build the kind of solid skillset that fills the gaps left by Universities, namely on the ‘soft skills’ side, and commercial.

• Discover DiSC, and its power to improve relationships, teamwork, stakeholder engagement, and increase self-awareness.
• Develop a greater awareness of their impact on the business, the lifetime value of a customer and matching new product development with a tangible, proven need: APM PFQ certification in Project Management and commercial skills.

In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Dr. Daniel Goleman says: “Success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess… We need another sort of skill in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future - internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability…”

Stage 2 delivers critical capabilities which, when combined with strong communication skills, can make all the difference to engineers working in teams, on projects, and when learning to work with a wide range of stakeholders. When soft skills don’t come naturally or haven’t been taught, developing them can be challenging. Because a lack of soft or core skills can often hold young people back, we recommend topics such as developing empathy, influence, creativity, and conflict management, at this stage.

Your graduates will also, in addition to a rounded programme of ‘soft-skill development’, have the opportunity to gain solid qualifications to add to their portfolio, enhance their overall effectiveness and contribution to the business, and build greater technical competence.

Duration: Up to 12 months

Subjects include financial management, cost estimating, IP for engineers, aspiring engineering manager, creativity & innovation, strategy & problem solving, time management, world-class maintenance, Prince2 Foundation, and CMI L3 in Principles of Leadership and Management.

Key themes in the second year revolve around gaining additional industry-led qualifications and adding in another layer of non-technical capability.

• Gain qualifications in CMI and Project Management - teaching graduates how to lead and manage teams and projects.
• Deepen your graduates’ commercial and financial capacity to support a more mature appreciation of business and profit.
• Build confidence in stakeholder management and mapping, presentations, their leadership style, running successful meetings, and conflict resolution.

During this stage of the programme, graduates begin to fully grasp the responsibility they have individually and as part of a team, and the expectations placed on them. They begin to appreciate just how significant the investment in them is by an employer. Both of these converge, generally bringing increased self-awareness and occasionally a slight wobble in confidence. It’s absolutely critical to manage both of these aspects well, so in addition to some targeted skills development, Stage 3 seeks to build confidence, a greater sense of security and well-being, and develop reflective practices to underpin their next steps.

Duration: Up to 24 months

With some graduate programmes lasting two and others three years, we continue to flex this next stage around your requirements and extract key objectives and next steps to help you off-board your graduate population into their next role.

We recommend a complete team diagnostic/360 at this last stage, some further technical and commercial skills such as project costing, and that they begin working on their CMI Level 5 in Leadership and Management.

In addition to training graduates, provision has been made to train your managers, team leaders, and anyone else responsible for supporting your graduate population.

This could be coaching and mentoring, feedback and 360/diagnostics data gathering, preparing personal and professional development plans, mentoring for MPDS, and communication and influence, for example. Within our extensive portfolio, following a diagnostic discussion with you and your key staff, decisions can be made around which skills to prioritise, so that your whole organisation is ready to accept each new cohort and the learning and insights that will inevitably bring with it.