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A Record-Breaking Summer of Graduate Training at Neueda
Posted 10 October 2024
Written by Nick Todd
For many people, particularly in the colder parts of Europe, the summer conjures up thoughts of where to go on holiday, lovely sunny weather, and a chance to relax and enjoy the sunshine. However, here at Neueda Technologies, the summer is our busiest season. And this year has been the busiest graduate training season ever.
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Scaling Up: Key stats from our busiest summer to date
– 50 intern and graduate programs delivered to over 3,899 learners with 1,585 training days.
– 245 instructors teaching across almost every continent and multiple timezones.
– Delivered to 5 global tier one banks and insurance companies.
A global graduate program in action
How do we do it?
To illustrate how we deliver graduate training programs at this scale, I am going to focus on just one client – a tier 1 bank.
This bank had a brand new requirement for us to deliver a graduate program in person across Mexico, UK, Hong Kong China, mainland China, Poland and India.
This program had two streams – an engineering stream focused on developers, and a second stream focused on data scientists, cybersecurity engineers and business analysts.
Step 1 – Making a plan
We involve two key individuals for any program like this:
- Learning Consultant
- Client Delivery Lead
The role of myself, the Learning consultant, is to work with the client to identify what the content should look like. In this case, the learning consultant was me! I delivered my first program like this back in 2002 for a different tier 1 bank, and I have been delivering these kinds of program almost every year since then!
The client delivery lead was Rebecca Strain. Rebecca’s role is vital as she ensured that we remain on track, have all the appropriate governance and reporting in place, and ensuring that the commercials are all in place.
The process of defining the content is an iterative process where we work with SMEs from the bank and go through several cycles of iterative reviews of a proposed content outline for the program to ensure that we hit the right mark.
Step 2 – Getting prepared
Once we know what we are teaching and where we are teaching it, we go out to our extensive global network of proven instructors to identify the best instructors for the program. This program was in person, so in most cases we used instructors who are from the regions where the training is taking place.
Step 3: Empowering Students Through Real-World Training
The students began their training with us with 3 days of in person professional skills training – delivered in person at each of the locations.
They then began 3 weeks of technical training.
The student platform
Back in 2022, Neueda acquired Conygre Consultants. Conygre had created a platform that enabled students to access an environment that could be created to mirror the environment and platform of the clients infrastructure but without the complexity of sorting out complex access rights. This platform was used globally for this program. In fact, Neueda use this platform for almost all their global graduate training programs. At peak, over the summer, it is supporting over 1000 concurrent learners located throughout the globe.
The delivery style
Our programs are not like universities. We deliver a mix of project work, presentations, lab exercises, and lectures. This is also broken up with guest speakers from the bank giving presentations on internal aspects of the technology used by the firm.
There is also a project at the end where graduates work in teams to deliver a working solution of some kind of technology. This can be a fullstack app deployed via a pipeline to Kubernetes, or it could be a data related project where a story is told from some financial data. These projects are then presented to their future managers and other stakeholders from within the bank. This often proves to be the highlight of the program. It is definitely a time of celebration as the presentations are completed and the program comes to a close.
Step 4 – Continuous Feedback and Impact Measurement
Throughout the program, we are collecting data. This data comprises of all sorts of information including:
- Test scores from the weekly tests we run
- Instructor commentary on the graduates
- Graduate feedback on the training
In reality, this data is presented back to the client in weekly form through a mix of presentations, and raw data sets which we feed back to the client. Rebecca did a fantastic job of collating all this information from our instructors and back end reporting systems.
As I write this the program ended just a couple of weeks ago. I am now looking to enjoy my summer on the beach – although apparently – summer has just finished…
Summary
This example will give you a flavour of what we are able to achieve. Remember, that whilst we were delivering this program, we were also delivering multiple other programs for multiple other corporations in multiple other locations!
If you are interested in finding out more about how Neueda can help you with your graduate training programs, do get in touch with me at nick.todd@neueda.com.
