The ECITB has launched its new £5m Graduate Development Grant programme to support leadership and management training for graduates embarking on engineering construction careers
The new Graduate Development Grant programme is in response to calls from employers and Government to ensure new graduates entering the industry have the know-how to take on key roles in the workplace.
The scheme will support more than 150 individuals each year with each graduate receiving £12,000 over three years.
Learning objectives
Graduates can undertake training against a variety of learning objectives, including in project management, commercial awareness, leadership and report writing. By ensuring more engineering graduates possess these core competencies, the future engineering construction workforce will be more able to lead and deliver projects and possess transferable skills that are in-demand across all sectors of the industry.
Chris Claydon, chief executive of the ECITB, commented: “Across the engineering construction industry there is both a need to recruit and train the highly skilled workforce of the future and also to round off individuals’ academic learning with the soft skills required by employers.
“We have listened to calls from industry employers to fund graduate training in a similar way to apprenticeships and we are proud to support the investment employers make in their new recruits.”
The grant also supports engineering graduates being developed against the Engineering Council Standard for Professional Engineering Competencies, which means companies can use their own training schemes as well as ECITB-designed programmes.
Graduate Development Grant
A number of employers have already started to take advantage of the Graduate Development Grant with approximately 130 graduate recruits from 20 companies supported by the scheme at the start of 2020.
Paul Fox, HR director at Offshore Design Engineering Ltd, said: “We are delighted to have our recruits among the first cohort of the ECITB’s new Graduate Development Programme.
“It makes perfect sense to invest in specialist training for those embarking on engineering careers from a University background in the same way as we do for school-leavers entering into apprenticeships. It is a huge step forward in the way we approach learning and development for highly skilled new recruits.”
The Graduate Development Grant is the first of a number of initiatives set out in the ECITB’s new business plan.
