Graduate Development

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You might have just finished your degree but your learning never stops with us. There is a huge range of development opportunities waiting for you. What’s right for you will depend on your current skills, career goals and the breadth of project work available to you.

Major highlights of our Graduate Development programme are:

Induction

This year’s intake of graduates will be planning your induction event. These are usually 2 day events, when you first start, where you’ll form friendships and networks with other grads and some of our key people. We’ll help you understand who we are, who you are and how to hit the ground running.

My Personal Success Plan – My PSP
There is no doubt about it, we want you to succeed. You will set objectives with your Performance and Development Manager (PDM) and regularly review progress against these. You and your PDM will decide how best to work together to motivate and develop you.

We want you for your flashes of genius but behaviours are also important to us.  As a part of our team we’ll expect you to PERFORM against these behaviours:

Pace – We are ahead of the game in the pace of our delivery and innovation to customers

Employability – We support the employability of all of our people through personal development

Relationships – We work well with others based on strong relationships
 
Focus – We are flexible and agile and focus on meeting expectations
 
Openness – We have a no surprise culture and hold ourselves accountable to do what we say
 
Reputation and Responsibility – We go the extra mile and drive open communication
 
Management and Leadership – We take accountability for managing ourselves and our work
 

Foundation Programme for Leaders

We automatically enrol new graduates on the Foundation Programme. You are unique so your mix of modules will be individually tailored to suit your needs. Some of the modules will be delivered with your cohort and some will be at your own pace.

Modules cover:

  • Personal Effectiveness (e.g. communication skills and report writing)
  • Business Awareness (e.g. Project Management and Finance)
  • Basics of People Management (e.g. having difficult conversations

Initial Professional Development (IPD)

As a QinetiQ employee, you will be encouraged to join the Company's Initial Professional Development Scheme – one of the largest and most proactive in the country, with over 200 developing professionals, and a similar number of Chartered mentors. This scheme is well known and respected by the professional institutions, many of whom have either recognised or formally accredited it.

Participation in a structured IPD scheme, with formal mentoring and work-based learning, helps graduates to grow their professional competencies quickly. This typically shortens the period between graduation from university and the achievement of a recognised professional qualification, such as CEng or IEng (for engineers); or CSci, CPhys, etc (for scientists). The QinetiQ Scheme can also support non-technical disciplines.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Activities

We are passionate about inspiring generations of children and students to take the right subjects to become our scientists and engineers of the future. All employees are encouraged to do this but our graduate community in particular act as excellent STEM Ambassadors. Click here for more details about QinetiQ in the Community

On the job learning

Every day with us you’ll be learning something new. It’s easy to forget the wealth of skills you’ll learn by simply doing your everyday job. Our graduates say our Unique Selling Point is the sheer breadth of projects they are involved in. Today it’s quite literally rocket science and tomorrow it could be back down to earth working on an equipment trial in sub-arctic temperatures. On some projects you never have the same day twice.

Accelerated Development
QinetiQ also has a programme for identifying high performing and talented individuals.  An individual development plan is put together for those identified.  Coaching and further opportunities are then available for the individual to accelerate their development to meet their full potential.