Case study – STEM Careers in NNL
This financial year, NNL relaunched our updated and improved Apprentice and Graduate programmes. Improvements followed comprehensive assessments of our previous offering, along with input from the existing Early Careers cohort.
Our 2022 intake of Graduates
The result is a set of popular, fit-for-purpose programmes that work for early career individuals as well as the business. We also formalised and further developed our work experience programmes to ensure they support inclusivity and access to opportunity.
Further to this, the early careers provision was enhanced with the offer of our new Postdoc programme. This is aimed at helping those with PhDs in areas relevant to our expertise make the transition from academia to industry in a way that enables them to harness their transferable skills and facilitate their development towards becoming a future Subject Matter Expert.
These programmes have been very successful, welcoming the largest cohort of early careers professionals that we have had to date (a total of 54, 35% of which were women) and significantly reducing the attrition we had seen in previous cohorts.
In addition, NNL recognises that careers go beyond the early careers stage and our Learning & Development team, working with the Career Development Workstream of our ED&I programme, has completed the development and launch of Careers Lab.
Careers Lab represents a lynch pin in addressing the National Equality Standard’s (NES) recommendations around the need for greater structure and transparency in terms of expectations around career progression and equality of opportunity.
Careers Lab contains the first two career pathways which focus on engineering and science careers within the business, guidance on Personal Development Reviews (PDRs), career planning guidance, links to NNL’s current jobs (all of which are advertised internally and, where appropriate, externally), as well as development opportunities.
The Career Pathways are benchmarked against the Hay system (which is what NNL uses to evaluate its new and existing roles) and make clear what the expected contribution, behaviours and knowledge level is at each broad pay band in that pathway. The aim is to ensure clarity and uniformity of expectations across the business, facilitating discussions between our people and their leaders and making it easier to determine what skills and experiences will be valuable in developing in a role or progressing a career. The added advantage of this linking up of processes for NNL is that it will make it easier for transferable skills to be identified and so allow for horizontal as well as vertical moves along a career trajectory.
The feedback from those who have visited the site is positive. The Career Development Workstream and Learning & Development team will continue to build on this foundation by developing the remaining career pathways needed to guide all careers within the business.
Careers Lab, combined with the right that employees now have to request that their job be re-evaluated if they feel it has changed significantly from their original role, mean that clearer standards and expectations on the activities associated with roles are being developed and deployed.