Our two-year Graduate Scheme is just one of the initiatives in place to support early career colleagues at JBA. With up to 80 individuals on the Graduate Scheme at any one time, participants benefit from a social network as well as the development programme. Maxine Zaidman, JBA's Head of Learning and Development tells us more.
Our pledge
We invest heavily in provisioning our Graduate development scheme. And with those at early career stages making up around an eighth of our workforce, the outlay is well worth the return.
To ensure graduates get the most out of their JBA careers, we make an upfront pledge to:
- Support your development
- Give you opportunities
- Listen to you
- Make senior staff accessible
- Get you involved in business
On-line graduate learning programme
Of course, making good on these promises is not easy. One of the key things we’ve been concentrating on is making sure consultancy skills are developed effectively in a hybrid workplace.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, graduates typically completed much of their degree remotely. And perhaps don’t have the same confidence in team situations as their predecessors. Even asking a question verbally in person can be a challenge for some graduates, despite being academically capable.
To address this our online graduate learning programme works in tandem with frequent one-to-one support from our Graduate Scheme Coordinator and the Graduate’s line manager. Networking events also help our graduates understand the important role they play within the company, whilst providing an opportunity to meet and gain inspiration from fellow graduates past and present.
Individual goals
Through our behaviours and competency framework, we help graduates identify individual goals, which they’re able to meet at their own pace and in a way that works for their role and team.
We also have our own in-house technical training programme. Though much of this is delivered through Teams rather than face-to-face in a classroom, this has allowed us to capitalise on the flexibility this offers in terms of practicality and cost. We can run more training, more often, and with fewer delegates. This means training can be delivered at the right time and with more opportunities for one-to-ones with the trainer.
We’re also doing our utmost to ensure our trainers have the right skills to optimise the course content and programme to suit the delivery method – through our ia our Train the Trainer programme.
Everyone at JBA gets an annual training allowance of six days (with a cap of £1400). Since we started running more of our training online, we’ve found that our employees spend more time training but utilise less of their budget. That’s a win-win for us as a company.
For details of how to apply, more information on our different graduate pathways and a full list of graduate benefits, visit our online graduate hub here.
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