We have a great deal of expertise and insight when it comes to developing and retaining graduates and we have been consulting in this field for several years. We offer three key graduate services - research, consultancy and development programmes.

Our aim is simply to help companies develop and retain proactive, commercially orientated graduate talent. We believe this will help organisations create competitive advantage, ensuring that their people are a key component of their success.

During 2004 and early 2005 we carried out proprietary qualitative research in a number of blue-chip companies to find out what the key attitudes and behaviours were of top performers who had originally joined the company via the graduate programme. The research particularly focused on the graduates at selection and during the first 2 years of work. The research results have directly helped inform our current services.

If you feel your organisation would benefit from bespoke research then we can carry this out on your behalf or advise how you may best design a piece of research.

Hiring graduates can be a large investment for many companies and it is important that it is handled well to get the best return on investment. We work with clients by either providing all of their graduate development needs, or discrete programmes. We do not offer a one size fits all approach to our graduate programmes but ensure that we understand your business and key challenges so that the programme can be tailored to your specific needs. We offer consultancy services to ensure that you maximise your efforts and results in the following areas:

• Recruitment
  

  We are experienced in designing assessment centres targeted at the graduate population, ensuring that you recruit the best young talent for your organisation. These assessment centres are aimed at measuring emotional intelligence and openness to learn and be self-aware as well as more traditional qualities such as intellect and potential for leadership.

• Development
  

  We are able to deliver standard or tailor made development programmes to our clients and can also consult with you on the overall design of your graduate programme. We are able to offer an external perspective to leading edge graduate practises as a result of our extensive experience in this area.

  If you decide to partner with us on development initiatives you can expect programmes which have been designed to ensure they are relevant to young, bright, challenging graduates transitioning into the workplace.

  • Embedding the ability to manage oneself effectively at work, ensuring graduates are easy and rewarding to manage and that they know how to take a proactive approach even though they are still a junior within the organisation.
  • Developing life long skills in extracting the maximum amount of learning out of the real environment you work in.
  • Developing the ability to get things done through other people, by influencing without authority and building long term mutually beneficial relationships
  • Instilling an attitude of accountability for results and raising the awareness of the needs of a commercial organisation
  
  
• The Graduate Consortium Programme
  

  This programme is an open programme for organisations that don't have sufficient numbers of graduates to run in house development, but see the clear benefits of investing in these staff. This programme covers the three key development areas, "releasing your own potential", "succeeding with others" and "the commercial reality".

Mentoring Skills©

In addition to graduate programmes we offer programmes for graduate managers and mentors, which provide solid frameworks and tools to help these individuals guide the development of the graduates encouraging and supporting self-managed behaviours.

• The Mentoring Skills Programme is designed to equip those who have volunteered for mentoring opportunities within the organisation. This programme is designed for building the readiness of the mentor to support the mentee throughout their learning whether that is a commercial graduate programme or an engineering apprenticeship.

Even though this is a classroom based programme, we create reality learning through the use of true to life scenarios and cases studies and we also aim to give delegates the opportunity to interview a mentoring champion from your organisation.

We are also skilled at designing and setting up internal mentoring faculties for our clients and can really help them get started on using mentoring to enhance their current development approaches.