Category Archives: Graduate Development

Many organisations are worried that their graduates retain a student culture that can be damaging to their reputations, and the reputation of the scheme as a whole. In this article we apply a creativity technique, Problem Inversion, to see why this might be happening.

When graduates come straight from university to your company – the first week will imprint them either with high flier skills in dealing with ambiguity, or a consumer mentality. Take our quiz to see if you are creating the right expectations…the answers may not be what you expect!

In a recent article we looked at the difference between training graduates together or separately, and the benefits of both approaches. Now I’d like to explore another idea which is emerging in graduate development – the idea that each graduate should be following an individual learning journey to best support their unique skills.

One thing we find consistently when working with clients to develop their graduate programmes is that the focus is almost exclusively on training graduates together as a group, from welcome events and inductions to role specific training. The rational is that this enables graduates to develop a strong network across the organisation, helps them stay free of departmental “silos”, and adds value as they understand what’s going on in other areas of the business. However, this approach to training has some significant downsides.