DCo can help with all aspects of your graduate development. From a complete development process that effectively meshes with your organisation’s early careers framework through to one-off bespoke initiatives to meet a specific need.
Our graduate development programmes are bespoke and designed to suit your requirements. The following options are popular elements of a graduate development process:
Providing graduates with an interactive, engaging and useful induction experience is a really powerful development opportunity.
New starters always benefit from understanding your organisation’s culture and how the wider business operates. We design and facilitate bespoke events that can allow the time for graduates to hear from business leaders, ask questions, understand opportunities available to them, appreciate the systems and procedures they will encounter in their role and importantly build relationships and develop a strong peer network.
Effective induction will achieve more than just sharing information with your new recruits. It is the beginning of their engagement and integration with the company, and will have a significant impact on how quickly they achieve job satisfaction, effective performance levels and team working.
We can design and facilitate an interactive induction event whatever your requirement.
Experiential Development Programmes are an immersive learning process that achieve impressive results.
Put simply experiential development is learning through experience and reflection. We learn best from experience, and within the format of a bespoke programme graduates are able to undertake controlled practical development projects that allow for rapid trial and error.
The learning that takes place in this format is effective and long lasting as it achieves behaviour change as well as the application of new skills.
DCo design bespoke experiential programmes for graduates that intertwine direct and often practical experience of core skills within a learning environment and subject context.
We focus on connecting the active participation in development projects with a challenging review and reflection process that ensures the learning is centred on the workplace and the opportunities for transition of skills.
Experiential Development Programmes are often run as extended residential experiences and we have the benefit of being able to deliver these at our facility in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.
Providing graduates with a mentor in their early career provides an excellent framework for their professional support and development within your organisation.
DCo deliver programmes to train and equip mentors with the skills and techniques that they need to gain the most benefit from the relationship. Mentor training ensures that you have a consistent and competent cohort of mentors who are confident to handle a range of mentoring challenges and plan successful outcomes.
The Mentee plays an equal part in making a mentoring relationship work. We place importance on preparing graduates for their role as a mentee to ensure that they get the most out of having a mentor and use the relationship effectively.
Graduate retention is an important consideration for employers. As graduates progress through your scheme, complete their placements and projects they will inevitably approach future career path choices. It can be beneficial at this stage to provide career development workshops designed for your graduate intake.
The purpose of these initiatives is to allow the graduates to reflect, evaluate and plan their options. DCo design bespoke career development events based on your graduate development priorities.
Options for career workshop programmes may include:
Investing in your graduate’s as they move into the next stage of their careers provides clear business benefits and actively involves them in the options available to them. Achieving a high level of engagement with your graduates at this point of their career path is a signficant factor in retention of your graduate talent.
We provide bespoke Assessment Centres to help you select and recruit to your graduate scheme.
Assessment Centres provide an objective measure of selection that will assess graduates against the competencies and behaviours that you wish to see. It can be difficult to separate candidates on paper, but the observed process that places candidates in a range of situations and measures their response, is an excellent format to see individual’s reactions and interactions with others.
DCo design Assessment Centres that are tailored and reflective of your organisation. We design exercises that suitably challenge candidates and test their performance against your agreed competencies. We welcome the involvement of internal staff in the observation porcess and have a track record of training teams of internal observers to undertake this role successfully.
We can also provide psychometric assessments to support your recruitment and these can be used to measure personality preferences or ability in core areas like candidate’s numerical and verbal reasoning skills.
Modular Development Programmes provide regular development support to your graduate intake as they progress through your scheme. DCo design bespoke content for modular programmes to ensure that the development is in line with the skills required of graduates at different stages of their early career with you.
Organisations provide graduates with technical training and specific commercial skills that bridge the gap between university and your workplace yet still find that their graduates require additional development in areas often defined as ‘soft skills’. These include the way that graduates interact with others, present themselves and formal communications, are able to organise, make decisions and influence people. It can include their ability to manage projects and change iniatiatives as well as demonstrate management and leadership potential, negotiate and innovate effectively.
DCo will design face to face modules to support your graduates as they grown into their roles or rotate placements. Whatever the skills required to support your graduates during their early career with your organisation we are happy to discuss how we can help and will ensure that we work in partnership with you to schedule delivery at the right time in your graduate scheme.