Grad Programs - Are they hitting the Mark?

Many large and small companies have graduate programs for their new recruits. To what extent are they hitting the mark for those young and eager young professionals? Are you getting what you want that help you on your career path? Here are some ideas I put together - tell me if you agree and how your company is measuring up!

Retain your grads – Copy Google!

Google Inc has recently been chosen as the Australian graduate’s employer of choice, with Macquarie Bank and Microsoft a close second and third in a survey by CareerOne.com.au in February 2008. A Onetest study also found that if a graduate’s needs are met, 39% would stay with a company for 3 – 5 years and 30% would for 5 years or more.

So what does Google do that has the grads swarming to them and sticking around? What do graduates “need” that you can deliver on? How can your organisation mimic Google and get those same results?

Google is known for its fun culture as well as being a highly reputable and successful company. These are two key elements that attract and retain grads there. So how is your company viewed in the graduate market? Do you have a good reputation? It is that reputation that gets a graduates attention in the first place. And what about your culture from a graduates point of view. Would it be considered fun?

Research has also found that graduates are also looking for:

• Roles with responsibility

• Training and progression plans

• Acknowledgment
  

• Access to opportunities like travel

• Competitive salary

• Work/life balance

The “how’s” of these are many and varied and you need to find the right mix for your company’s graduate program, or for those one or two grads you’ve just recruited. Here are some suggestions:

• Help grads to work out what it is they REALLY want to do in their careers and how you can help them achieve that. This generation is seeking purpose and satisfaction but often struggle with working out what they really want in amongst all of the options they have. Provide some time, training and coaching around exploring this and it will have them develop trust and respect for you and your organisation.

• Getting it right from the beginning involves being clear and up front about salaries, expected work-loads, explanation of day-to-day functions in their first role and how that will evolve. These should all to be covered in the recruitment phase.

• Understand that in the recruiting process that it’s not just your company choosing the them, it is also them choosing you!

• Be honest! If you expect your grads to work long hours, let them know. This is better than just dumping it on them when it’s needed and when they weren’t expecting it.

• Create a graduate network that has regular events and socialising activities. This will help them with the transition into full-time work, and will increase the ‘fun’ factor as they’ll be spending time with friends, not just colleagues.

• Set up mechanisms from the beginning to assist them with career planning within the organisation. This could be anything from online systems, to regular career goals sessions with managers, to career management training to ensure they are taking responsibility for this. This allows them to see the bigger picture and how their role will develop overtime.

• Provide lots of information about the training the grads will receive. They are usually highly aware that they have the degree but not necessarily all of the skills needed to do the job and will appreciate the reassurance that training and support is provided. Let them know you’re willing to invest in them.

• Focus on a graduate’s potential, interests and values and use those to create the best rotation plan for them and the organisation, so that everyone wins. This can be part of the career planning that is put in place at the beginning, and leads to strategic rotation plans for individuals.

• Have ongoing touch points in their first six to nine months with an emphasis on personal and professional development for the graduates. This could take the form of training, presentations, time with the directors, events, meetings with managers or off-site forums. You can also use these as opportunities to acknowledge the graduates for progression, achievements and the like.

• Match them up with mentors from across the organisation. This helps with access to opportunities and career planning. Some level of structure or assistance will ensure an effective mentoring relationship is formed.

• Ensure managers have an understanding of the graduates needs and they are equipped to work with them effectively. Plus ensure they have the time required and are making it a priority to provide the regular feedback that these grads are seeking.

• Consider some reviews are taken by people who are not the graduates manager/s to encourage more openness

• Show you care about them as a person by giving them structured time off to learn something non-work related eg: volunteer work, art course, or team stuff like Artescape (http://www.specialevents.com.au/archiveprev/2001/11nov01/featnov01/art.html) or Go Karting

• Work with them on their need for work/life balance by starting with the expectation that the things they will want time off for are concerts, trips with friends, travel, and other fun life stuff that they don’t want to miss out on. Be clear on your organisations needs in regards to their role and responsibility and work on finding the win-win. There is nothing that will turn a grad off quicker than missing out on the “must-see” concert/event/holiday/whatever that all of their friends are going to because their “boss wouldn’t let them.”

• Give grads evidence that your organisation acts ethically and is socially aware. This may be through information about your CSR programs and how they can get involved.

• Communicate the values or the organisations and the values you are looking for in grads to ensure you get grads whose values are aligned to yours.

• Ask them directly what is or isn’t working about their grad experience. Help them to explore it if they don’t know. And use this collective information to re-vamp and re-fresh your graduate program.

• Set up special innovation teams where grads and other employers can provide ongoing ideas on ways that new technology, especially web 2.0, can be used to do business better.

• Provide training for the grads on how to work with multi age teams.

There is also an opportunity for those providing career services to students. Career services at tertiary institutions could also be helping students to learn more about these career realities. From starting salaries to career progression can be explored in Career Readiness presentations and workshops for students, as well as career management skills like self promotion, presentation and networking skills. This helps with setting up student’s expectations early with some frank information about those realities, thus helping organisations. But also, building students career management skills helps them to be in control of their careers early helping employers with their career planning programs.

The Frank Team can work with organisations and career service providers to implement and refresh your graduate programs. They know how to blend creativity and fresh thinking with process to implement the ideas. They provide workshops, presentations and consultancy services. More information is available for Employers at http://www.frankteam.com.au/corporates/ and http://www.frankteam.com.au/youth2youth/workshop-package.aspx for Career Service Providers.

Your Career Pathway

Did you know that $1.3billion is lost to the economy in poor and mixed transitions of young people per year (DEEWR 2008). That is from young people starting in one area and then changing after realising it is not for them, or changing tertiary courses, or moving around to really find “what they want to do”. Part of this is inevitable as it does take some time to work it out, but perhaps with a little more self reflection and quality career advice at a younger age it would reduce this amount and have more young people “living” what they really want to do earlier in their careers.

Through our Frank Team workshops and programs we often hear the comment “I wish I had done this analysis earlier”. What is involved in this analysis?

• Explore past experiences, achievements and milestones since your were about 14 years old.

• Identify those elements that stand out because they helped you to learn something, you thoroughly enjoyed, you felt strongly about or gave you great satisfaction.

• See what actions and skills describe those moments and how important they are to you

• Combine your top ones into a perfect job description.

• Reflect and see is your tertiary studies or current work conditions in line with this job description.

• If yes, woo hoo! Keep progressing in that area. If no, then where would you like to get to and how are you going to do that. This may involve a re-think and some changes.

This basic analysis of skills, actions, values and interests is essential and really listening to what the results are saying to you.

When you are at the beginning of your career journey, what should be a part of everyone’s career program to help this analysis?

• Combine study with work experience and on the job training. This is so you can take your theory and put it into practice straight away. But also it has you experience the “real” world in that area/industry earlier so you can really work out if it fits with you.

o You can do School Based Apprenticeship and Traineeships these days that do on the job training and school study. It is a wonderful way to get this combined experience and get a foothold into the job market early.

• Don’t expect it all to be “fun and games.” Some people start in their chosen career/industry and within 2 weeks start saying “I hate it.” Now if this is truly connected to not enjoying the core work involved then fair enough perhaps you need to re-think and potentially change. But I would say 2 weeks is not enough to truly experience and see the opportunities in that career/industry. Everyone has to start somewhere, and sometimes that is at the bottom but there are always opportunities and ways of learning more and moving ahead; so perhaps you need to grit your teeth and see it out a little further before making the rash decision of doing a complete change. And remember, your progress is UP TO YOU so start finding the opportunities and doing something about it.

• Online personality and career quizzes are available to help you too. Check these out below, but remember that many of these “quizzes” are limited and need to put you into a box so use them as a guide only rather than a decision making tool! But be honest with yourself when you are filling them out. See if they indicate you are heading in the right direction.

o http://jobsearch.gov.au/careerquiz/careerquiz.aspx

o http://www.jobjuice.gov.au/jobjuice/apps/quiz/views/quiz.aspx

o http://www.princetonreview.com/cte/quiz/career_quiz1.asp

o http://www.personalitytype.com/quiz.asp

o http://www.hr.unsw.edu.au/osds/mycareer.html

• Go to networking events to meet the people who work in that area. See if they are your kind of people, what they are talking about and what different career paths are available in that area.

• Check in with your own motivations. Are you going into that industry for the right reasons? If you are doing it cos all of your friends are doing it, your parents want you to, it makes good money or cos it sounds like fun then you may not be 100% happy in the near future. Career choices need to based on your passions, interests and aspirations. Combine this with your skills you enjoy using and you should see a few options open to you.

• Encourage your school/university (or seek out for yourself) to start:

o Having guest speakers in many different areas/industries.

o Regular reflection on activities (from work experience, to sport, to musicals etc) to see what skills you have learnt but most importantly what elements of them that you enjoyed and would like to learn more about.

o Check out websites about careers and early career development.

o Encourage parents to tell their career stories to students and their kids.

o Build your career management skills eg: networking skills, presentation skills, goal setting.

o Have local employers do presentation about what day-to-day is like in their organisation and the career opportunities.

These are just some initial ideas – what do you wish you had done earlier to help to work out what you “really” want to do?

They say that you can tell you are on “purpose” when your work doesn’t feel like work; well for at least 60 – 70% of the time! That feeling of enjoying yourself, feeling happy and being positive the majority of the time in the workplace shows that you are in the right place. If there is a lack of motivation, you are disengaged or just plain unhappy then you probably want to have a re-evaluation of your career and put yourself in the driver’s seat of making some changes. Anything is possible, so see what you can create for yourself!

Consistent Self Marketing

They say it takes on average 6 contacts with a potential customer before they buy. If we take this sales principal and link it to your career and your own self marketing campaign we see the importance of regular and consistent contact with your network to keep them fresh, hot and for them to convert into real opportunities for you or them.

Consistent and considered marketing with the aim of relationship building and self promotion is essential to career success today. Contact every 6 weeks is good timing.

How to do this?

1. Regular networking to connect with your contacts and meet new people. This can be on and offline networking these days with online conferences or in-person evening events and breakfasts.

2. Summarise some tips you have learned from a recent speaker you have heard and share them with your network.

3. Regular catch up phone calls.

4. Email an article to your contacts that you have written that they would find useful. Or add it to your blog and direct your contacts to the new post.

5. Add a subscription option to your blog to continue building your network. I know this may seem scary for the non-techny people (like me!) but it’s not too hard, and totally worth it, so persist!

6. Follow up any “new” people you meet the next day and then add them to your database.

7. Bunch together any recent positive comments or feedback you get from customers and email them to your manager. Add other positive feedback people on your team have also got too.

8. Update professional photos on your professional Facebook page and send to your contacts.

9. Remember birthdays! Send a quick ecard or email or even an old fashioned but much loved snail-mail card!

Career Development Week

Did you know there is now an official "National Career Development Week"? Yep! From 2 - 8 June. All over Australia Schools and tertiary providers will be running events to help people learn more about careers today.

We put our thinking hats on and thought of what would be some fun things we wish we had going on at our school when we were there (all them years ago!!) to help us learn more about careers today. This is what we came up with.....which ones do you like?

NATIONAL CAREER DEVELOPMENT WEEK

Some easy & effective activities to run at your school:

Even if all you have is some lunchtimes, morning roll-call or afternoon time slots, there is still a lot you can do….

· Your “event crew”! Ask for a group of students who are interested in running events, like big comps, or weddings or the like, to come and get together to run some activities for career week with you. They would get to see what it is like to run an event!

· Themed guest speakers or panels of guest speakers at lunch each day (Themes could be: fashion, journalism & writing, sports, small business, doctors/lawyers/dentists, but give them a cool name). You can use your past students here. To keep the interest up and to have the students generating the interest themselves, ask a different student each day to be the MC who introduces and thanks the guest speakers, and gets the students asking questions.

· Sure fire way of getting students involved – make a competition out of it! Possible house career competitions that can run all week and contribute to the overall house points running in the school. Or individual competitions with cool prizes will also work:

o Write a Career quiz each day that is handed out and completed in Form time and submitted to your Careers Centre. You can then announce the winners at morning assembly. Some of the questions could involve students asking teachers questions about their careers, or going online to find out average starting salaries of certain jobs, and required experiences to get into a certain industry. Of course winners are awarded house points or small personal prizes!

o A group of students from each house/grade could source someone interesting to interview about their careers (a past student, someone they know etc). These interviews could be done as written or via another media (video, mp3 etc). The best of these interviews are chosen, and then they are shown at lunch time on the Friday to all of the school. This whole process could be taken on by your English department and students complete a module of their curriculum while preparing videos for Career Development Week.

o Guess the 1^st job that your principal and vice principal had – this helps students to see that you have to start somewhere, and everyone has very varied career paths these days. Have a running record of everyone’s guesses somewhere in the school where everyone can see it. Then announce the winning guess and points again go to houses or a personal prize is awarded.

o House/Group debate on a career topic (like Does the Glass Ceiling Still Exist Today for women! Or Does school prepare you for Careers Today!) during a lunch time.

· Teachers could be encouraged to use in class time to tell the students their career story. Students could try and guess their 1^st jobs!

· Run career tips over the PA during the week

· Run a jobs market at one lunch time, where all of the real and current casual and part time jobs available in suburbs located close to your school are displayed for students to look through and apply for. Have some assistants there to help the students work out the best ways to apply for the jobs. You could make this part of class time as well for commerce.

· Staff vs student debate on a career topic (like does the glass ceiling still exist today for women!) during a lunch time.

· Mock Interview Panels: Either during lunch or specific class time a mock interview panel is set up for students to test their interviewing skills.

· Job Interview Skills – The What, Why & How of WOWing them in job interviews.

Remember, here at The FRANK Team we specialize in providing creative education solutions that inspire and empower young people to make their career, business & community goals a reality. Our authentic, fun and innovative skills training, guest speakers & resources are especially designed for young people.

University Investment - Make it Work for You

The Australian Scholarships Group (ASG) has a new online calculator to help estimate costs for completing a university degree today. You can find it at www.asg.com.au and click on the calculator link. It can even take into account the differing costs for someone studying while living at home, or those moving out.

For someone living at home to become a teacher it is about $56,700. For a nurse it is $41,900. And for an Engineer it is $70,000.

Big numbers and that is only for the textbook learning you get in the lecture rooms.

Career success and career development is about making that investment work for you. And not leaving it until you leave to build on that investment.

It is imperative today that while you study you are getting practical work experience, building your network of contacts and learning from mentors and leaders in your field. This is what will see you move ahead and make the most of your tertiary study investment. Finding ways to bring your learning to life, put it into practice, see where it fits or where it doesn't. The responsibility of this lies with you as you are the CEO of your career.

So how are you making your University Investment work for you?

Check out www.frankteam.com.au for great articles and resources that will help you learn more.