Early Career Acceleration for Graduates
You only get one opportunity to make a positive first impact on your graduates. We can help make them feel valued and invested in, and give them an inspiring image of your brand.
Feeding your talent pipeline from the bottom up is a key element of ensuring the successful organic growth of any organisation. The foundation population of today often becomes the core management population of tomorrow and the senior leaders of the future.
Take a good look at your current intake of graduates and consider the time and financial investment you have made. How many of them will still be working for you in three years time? One in four graduates will leave their first employer within a year.
How do you ensure that those you want to keep are the same ones who want to stay?
Most graduates believe that their graduate programme experience is a clear indication of the development culture and ongoing opportunities available. It is also their first taste of the culture of the organisation and a chance to build a network with their fellow joiners, often from all over the world.
Whether you bring in hundreds or only a handful of graduates, apprentices and interns each year, IDG’s Early Career programmes and events are an excellent way of accelerating their development, maximising the return on your investment in them and demonstrating your commitment to them. Here we outline some of our key offerings:
Graduate Boot Camps at Sandhurst
IDG have a unique partnering agreement with The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Sandhurst is a great place to have kick-off events right at the start of the graduate journey. Highly experiential, active and intensive, these allow graduates to get to know each other in an inspirational environment. Our highly inclusive programmes will challenge them mentally and physically, pushing them out of their comfort zones. The memorable nature of these experiences will leave the graduates talking about their first few days of work for years to come.
Large Scale Graduate Events
If you can’t, or don’t want to come to Sandhurst, then why don’t we come to you?
Do you want an engaging and experiential graduate kick-off event, or perhaps need some assistance bringing a pre-existing event to life? We can design collaborative or competitive exercises which deliver real learning objectives, or provide additional exercises or content to your existing events. The memorable nature of these experiences will leave the graduates talking about their first few days of work for years to come.
Early Career Essentials
We want to ensure that your new hires are provided with the opportunity to excel right from the start of their career. We will work alongside your current curriculum, or develop new content to provide in-house graduate skills and behavioural development. This might include: time management; living and understanding organisational values; presentation skills; holding ‘courageous’ conversations; influencing without authority; communication; people management skills; increasing self awareness and managing personal brand; developing resilience and more.
Project Me
Putting control of the development journey into the hands of the participants, Project Me is about empowering people by giving them access to great coaches and mentors, choice over the development that they receive and putting them in charge of creating, scoping and delivering a business improvement project. They have regular touch points with a talent board where they present updates on their personal and collective development journey. This programme is also an excellent initiative for those who have recently completed a formal graduate programme, allowing the organisation to demonstrate continued investment in the development of their people.
Commercial Excellence
Understanding how businesses make money is a vital professional skill. Understanding how YOUR business makes money is a key differentiator for graduates and new hires. We run experiential two or three-day business simulations to develop commercial awareness and financial understanding. Acting as the senior leadership team, participants are required to formulate and deliver on a growth strategy in an extremely competitive and fast paced environment. They must devise innovative and commercial ways to build shareholder value and manage business risks. The programme culminates with a Dragons’ Den style presentation to potential investors where there can only be one winner…
The Sandhurst Experience
A one-day visit to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, a world renowned centre of individual and organisational development excellence, is a perfect opportunity to inspire and develop your early career population. Delegates have the unique chance to soak up the atmosphere and learn about the core Army leadership philosophies such as the principle of ‘Servant Leadership’. This can be coupled with attending the ‘Commandant’s Parade’ to witness part of the culmination of the Officer Cadets’ training; a tour of the Academy; an introduction to values based culture; and the military’s leadership philosophies that can be transferred back into the workplace
Client Feedback
“IDG executed a superbly well received and thought provoking two days which asked our graduates to consider their approach to the world of business from the view point of, firstly, being an effective follower before they consider themselves as leaders. The programme has served as a vital element to the ‘core graduate journey’ at the early stages of their career.”
Centrica Grad Team
“The Achieving Your Potential programme at Sandhurst was a great success. The opportunity for students to put theory into practice, experiment with different leadership behaviours and receive feedback from the highly experienced coaches and professional development experts from IDG will prove to be invaluable. The programme supports our employability skills agenda and ensures that we will continue to produce highly effective business leaders.”
Alexander Cross
Head of Professional Development, CASS Business School
“It is vitally important that all employees are fully aligned to the Company Core Values whilst focusing on delivering optimal performance on behalf of all stakeholders. This game, superbly facilitated by IDG over several years, has allowed the Values of Safety and the importance of Teamwork, in achieving Project success, to be reinforced highly effectively, and in a fun, enjoyable but challenging and stimulating environment.”
Director HR of a leading multinational oil and gas company
The Career Journey
Katie Laing
Project Manager
Contact Us
We would value the opportunity to discuss this further with you. Katie Laing is responsible for our Graduate and Apprentice programmes; to have a chat, find out more and book a programme, please contact her using the form below.