In 2017, the rates of unemployment within the graduate community reached its lowest since 1989.
The graduate jobs market has since been described as ‘in a robust situation’, regardless of the recent political and economic shocks. The changes in graduate unemployment levels may be due to a number of factors, but graduate training could be viewed as one of the core drivers in ensuring that graduates can secure and maintain a job, straight after university.
Goals of graduate training programmes
The current rate of unemployment for graduates has dipped to its lowest, since 1989, at 5.3%. From a healthy job market to internal efforts to attract and maintain graduates, companies are actively implementing more graduate training resources and courses to set their recently hired employees up with the skills to succeed.
More businesses are now implementing graduate training programmes, to cater for their fresh-faced university leavers. Graduates often enter their new work with academic knowledge of the industry, but often have little to no real-life experience within the working world.
General commercial skills, personal skills, financial awareness, workplace training, and interpersonal skills, can elevate your graduates above the competition and ensure they can put their fresh knowledge to good use, in the correct way.
Businesses should take advantage of their fresh-faced employees' motivation and drive, implementing graduate training programmes early on, while they are still in a studying mindset.
Moreover, companies must remove their reservations related to hiring university leavers, particularly regarding salaries and lack of on-the-job experience, to support the growth of the job market and strive to elevate their current staff to higher positions, while opening up junior positions for graduates.
Graduate training not only leads to well-versed and clued-up staff but can create a more committed workforce. This subsequently results in lower staff turnover and reduced costs associated with recruitment.
Employee engagement levels are proven to rise when companies invest in their development, therefore implementing a graduate training programme can, ultimately, increase the company turnover and productivity.
Reducing employee turnover through graduate training programmes
If you are concerned about the reliability of your graduates and their aptitude for completing a graduate training course, then it’s essential to promote the best parts of the course to ensure participants are fully aware of the credentials, prior to applying for a position at your company. This can prevent drop-outs and wasting funds due to incomplete training programmes.
It’s important for your company to ensure that they modernise, to engage with younger generations. The incorporation of technology into your teaching and graduate training practices is more likely to increase engagement with technology native and early adopter generations.
The further inclusion of technology elements into the daily work life, to streamline processes and offer a platform that graduates are familiar with is more likely to encourage enthusiasm and offers familiarity, in an otherwise new setting.
Ensuring the role is right for that candidate is crucial to retaining talent. Graduates have, in the past, been known to rush into roles that may not be well suited to them, for fear of having gaps in their resumé.
However, this can lead to higher staff turnover, when they inevitably realise they didn’t consider their options and job prospects effectively.
For businesses to help actively reduce this number, it’s important to provide a clear job description which should integrate a profile of the type of people that would enjoy working for your company; ideally based on other employees personality traits, interests, and motivations. It would also be beneficial to provide a roadmap of career progression, with predicted timescales, to offer achievable goals.
Finally, ensuring that an effective graduate training programme is in place to guide and further educate your new employees is crucial to success.
For graduates to gravitate beyond their existing knowledge and gain a better understanding of the working world, vital commercial and operational skills need to be taught.
This will not only alleviate the pressure put on existing staff, to train graduates from scratch, but also provides new starters with the feeling that they are being inducted into a company that cares enough to provide them with the vital skills they need to succeed.