About the scheme

In this blog I thought I would go into a bit more detail around the graduate scheme and how it operates.

Generally, as a graduate you work a series of placements across the business, generally lasting 4 to 6 months. As a graduate you have the opportunity to spend 20% of your time on activities outside of your day-2-day placement (i.e. 1 day a week).

This provides chances to be involved in some of the wider initiatives across the department, go on training courses or take part in a volunteer activities. It also lets you sometimes work with other graduates as small teams to deliver something important to the business.

Some of the recent activities I have been involved in outside my general day job:

* In May our graduate group went and spent a day painting a mural and improving a garden area at a local school, I turned out to be a half-decent artist!

* At the start of the year I was involved a consultancy piece for a team based in Wolverhampton that act as a development centre. I went down with 4 other grads and looked at ways they could improve aspects of their operation based on the knowledge we had gained through our experience and also through talking through with our networks of contacts. We then went back and did a feedback exercise and facilitated questions and answers

* Currently, I am working on a department wide initiative to simplify where line managers need to go if they have an issue to solve, problem to report or question to answer.

* And I'm also doing this blog!

All the above is accommodate into our "20% time", the other remaining time is focused on our placement role – see my other entries for a flavour of what I get up to …

There's a lot to do but variety and wider exposure to these challenges keep things interesting.

In terms of the graduates everybody is easy to get along with, helpful and we socialise fairly often. As a community we meet monthly to discuss what we are working on and what we might like to do coming up. As part of the scheme you also get opportunities to meet other grads from different parts of the business and understand what they do.

I can't think of a better way of getting to know a company and its people than being on a well run grad programme!