As an engineering manager, why would I want my engineers to take part in The Graduate Program in Engineering?

Firstly,The Graduate Program in Engineering is all about making your graduate engineers more confident, competent and committed, at the right time in their career (at the start!!). You know this because there are many things you know right now that you wish you had known earlier in your career. Of course, this is going to always be the case and we cannot solve that dilemma entirely, so let’s take the conservative position that becoming ‘professional’ is also about becoming more ‘reliable’ and you know that a reliable team is a high performing team. So by making your team more ‘reliable’ sooner rather than later can make a huge difference to the overall performance of your team.

Secondly, because this program is not just about the graduate engineer but also about you as the engineering manager we involve you from the very start. By your support you will also learn new ways to develop your team that you can use time and time again.

Thirdly, you understand the importance of a strong mentoring and manager relationship, and we have built in support to help you structure and conduct these relationships so that your graduate engineers can better leverage the experience of you and other key people in your organisation and this will in turn fast track their performance for your team. This is a win for the graduate engineer, you as the engineering manager and the overall organisation.

Finally,if we were to suggest a conservative 10% improvement in the development of your graduate engineers (above what would be considered typical in your organisation) then you know that this could equate to up to a 100% or more improvement in the productivity of your team. 10% improvement means 4 hours in every 40-hour week that is saved or more significantly 200 hours in every year. That is a good starting point when we consider this from the angle of the graduate engineer. But what happens when we consider that it might take you 10% less time to develop your graduate engineers and all of a sudden you are also saving this amount of time yourself. Now this is just the starting point, because if in fact you reinvested this time saving in developing your graduate engineer even further than the results will improve even more dramatically.

As an engineering manager, what is Chartered Status, and why is it important to engineers in my team?

Chartered Status is a competency benchmark for professional engineers in Australia and certifies that you practice in a competent, independent and ethical manner.

Chartered Status represents the highest standards of professionalism, leadership, up-to-date expertise, quality, safety, and the ability to undertake independent practice.

In the past Chartered Status has been a competitive advantage for engineers. Less than 1/3 of all engineers held the Chartered Status credentials. However, we are quickly seeing a shift in the engineering profession with more engineers becoming Chartered and it will soon become the recognition that represents professional hygiene rather than professional competitive advantage. What this means is that in the next decade, we could very likely see those without Chartered Status being left behind. This could start to impact on the perceived ability of your team to deliver results in engineering projects, should you have engineers on your engineering team who do not have Chartered Status. The impacts of this also increase significantly when we consider the difference the change in legislation around RPEQ now means for Queensland.

As an engineering manager, how much time will I have to commit in support to my team member(s) who take part in The Graduate Program in Engineering?

Engineering managers that understand the importance of developing graduate engineers will not commit any more time to The Graduate Program in Engineering than they would otherwise spend in the management of their graduate groups. In fact you may even find you spend less time because you have others doing the ground work for you (ie our EEA experts that work in the facilitated workshops on communication skills, business acumen etc).

Our expectation is that engineering managers support the graduate and also take part in the first module of the program so that everybody is aware of the outcomes of the program.