Up to Speed With the Next Generation
If you’re in the position to recruit and train new graduates, you could be faced with an expensive, time consuming process which fails to deliver the results you’d want, unless your thinking is a little out of the box.
The employment picture for the new generation of graduates seems bleak. There are estimated to be as many as 70 graduate applicants for every graduate vacancy. With an accumulation of graduates from previous years also seeking to swap their post-graduate studies or time stacking shelves for a chance to build a career, the competition for opportunities has rarely been as intense.
This presents a challenge not only to those leaving University. Alongside the unprecedented availability of degree holding applicants, there is a widely held perception that those leaving university don’t always have the skills, commercial or organisational understanding to easily transition into work role. As organisations respond to this perceived skill gap by setting up increasing numbers of graduate training schemes, the oversupply of applicants makes selecting the right people and planning their development burdensome for even the most well resourced HR team.
There are three issues to consider:
- Selecting those with the right mix of skills, experience and potential to benefit from the graduate opportunity
- Optimising the selection process so that it is both rigorous and manageable
- Planning a training journey which will ensure that these individuals not only develop the required skills, but stay inside the organisation to ensure such a considerable training investment pays off.
Recruit for attitude – train for skills
It’s become a cliché hasn’t it? The idea that we can teach people pretty much anything but we shouldn’t even try unless they’re ‘made of the right stuff’. Well, yes and no. The problem is – what is the right stuff? If the idea is that we recruit people who will ‘fit in’ or are similar to the people we already have, then to some extent we may be recruiting last century’s workforce to deal with the challenges of the future. Let’s not forget that a current graduate trainee could be retiring in around 2055. While I wouldn’t assume that we would be looking for someone to stay in the organisation for the duration of their careers, we might want long term service and I am constantly surprised when I meet senior directors of organisations, just how many of them started at the bottom and have worked their way through to the management board.
When taking on graduates, we are recruiting the leadership team of the future. Half a century ago, we’d certainly have been recruiting people for a job for life – who knows what the next half century will bring?
But what about Generation Y you may ask. Doesn’t this new generation reject the conformity of a job for life and moving up the organisational tree? Don’t they want to save the planet, travel the world one orphanage at a time and grow organic vegetables outside their artist’s studio? An insight about a whole generation which merely says their more individualistic seems to be not much of an insight.
Perhaps the post credit crunch coalition kids may be more conservative than their parents’ generation. After all this generation is the first to leave university with significant debts. Certainly the numbers of students re-enrolling for post graduate study – more than a quarter or 75,000 of this year’s graduates alone – would suggest a keen interest in furthering their career.
So what are the skills which this so called Generation Y offer an organisation looking to recruit the leadership team of 2040 and beyond?
The most important skill I would suggest they need is the skill to learn and adapt to a world we cannot yet describe. To go back 50 years to the words of Eric Hoffer: “In times of change learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” The output from a university education should not be about what they have learned but that they have the ability to learn and apply what they learn to the evolving world of work in which they will find themselves.
Selecting learners
Most graduate training schemes require a multi-level selection process. Part of the process may be an assessment centre, during which groups of hopefuls will demonstrate their ability to work as a team, solve problems and show their ability to respond to a brief and present ideas and plans. These are a valuable way of identifying some of these learning skills, but perhaps there is a way to make this more about learning skills than we had previously imagined.
Many organisations – and certainly many of the organisations who are currently recruiting to their graduate training schemes – have online induction materials. These e-Learning programmes supplement local manager inductions in a bid to save time and money and bring people up to speed on the global strategy of the organisation. Typically describing products, services, strategies, heritage and values to the new recruit, they are immediately available once someone has joined the firm.
Organisations are now making these materials available prior to joining or even in some cases, prior to recruitment. Think about it. If you have entry level training materials available online they can be distributed to potential recruits in advance of them attending an assessment centre and the information contained can act as a foundation for the problem solving activities during which the individual will be assessed.
Not only is this a relatively low cost, or even no cost addition to the selection process – it has two main cost saving benefits as well. The first is that when someone is recruited, they will already have completed a significant component of their induction programme and – assuming the materials are fit for purpose – then the speed to deploy these individuals to their respective teams will be that much faster.
There is a second, hidden benefit. Those who do not perform or do not display that they can manage their own learning using available online resources have also demonstrated that they don’t have the skills to be an independent information seeker – skills which will be vital in a world of internet and intranet information overload.
Although not focused on graduates, when Virgin Atlantic moved some of their initial cabin crew training online and required recruits to complete modules and associated assessments before starting with the company, they found two great benefits. The obvious one was that initial training could be shorter – saving a considerable amount of money. The second was unexpected. Although the number of new cabin crew who didn’t complete initial training was relatively low, these numbers dropped considerably – to almost zero – after the introduction of the pre-joining programme. Why? Quite simply the people who weren’t prepared to put the work in before starting or weren’t able to demonstrate their understanding of the complex health and safety rules they would need to master to pass the course, selected themselves out before starting the programme. It may seem like a small benefit until you realise that the cost of providing workbooks, uniforms, passes and entering them on to the payroll system was significant. By reducing drop out, Virgin Atlantic calculated that the total cost of the e-learning programme had been recouped simply from this source by the end of the first year of its operation.
Training Generation Y
This is the connected and networked generation. Their active use of the web – commenting, posting information about themselves and their activities, commenting on stories, videos and blogs – marks them out as the first true digital natives. These skills are already essential in the 21st Century learning organisation.
Being able to track and record your new graduate recruits’ online activity can generate new insight about their potential and their suitability to achieve within a modern organisation. The process of transactional networking which is becoming second nature to all of us who buy things online can generate information. If within your graduate training scheme you are able to set up some kind of learning management system which supports collaboration – online conversations, the opportunity to ask for information from the in-house subject matter expert, share ideas and solutions with others in the graduate cohort or simply leave feedback about their learning experiences – you can generate a profile of each individual. This can be used to support their further learning and development. It can also be used as an assessment mechanism. Interestingly, the data which is useful is not what people have posted, but the fact that these people have posted and shown themselves sufficiently motivated, engaged and interested to do so. These are the skills which will remove some of the strain from ‘teaching’ your new graduate recruits how to work in your organisation and enable them to demonstrate their ability to learn within the environment you have created.
If this environment is supportive of their drive to learn and develop, then the alternatives provided by competitors who have not invested similarly seem less attractive. Put simply, the networked, supported learner stays and grows.
