Graduate Review

Work directly affects the company and more grads than less feel valued in their role. However, sometimes its very beuaratic and easy to feel like a cog in a bigger machine with no direct influence on the end products, especially with manufacturing contract being set for 35 years in the future.

I got better at excel and not much else. You can develop a lot of soft skills but not hard skills, soft skills being stakeholder engagement, presnetation skills, networking and the like. Other graduate do learn a lot of hard skills but sometimes theyre very speicifc to BAE and not transferable.

The cranfield university PG Dip structure is poorly organised and not integrated well with the company work flow, and it shows as the company has now scrapped it making the qualifiactions we've worked hard for seem pointless. Some teams have been fun and some work rewarding but on the whole its been dissapointing.

The gradaute programme was well structured with set rotational placements, however as you make your way through there are spirals and turns that make it very unstructured. The cranfield university programme being one, but also sudden department shifts and trying to source your own placements suddenly grind everything to a halt and make it impossible to get good devleopment.

There is a lot of support in terms of flexi-time, good work life balance, ethical helplines and employee support groups. You will feel very safe and secure at BAE systems. However, you get very limited support for things such as skills devleopment, wanting to move teams to get new experiences and mentoring for career progression.

The company accepts that the Cranfield University courses are mandatory in the contract I signed and give me all the time necessary to complete the courses. internal training courses are well supported as well and time off from the day job to complete them can be arranged as paid leave if necessary.

I think it has given me a small insight into other forms of engineering such as cost and quality engineering. I would estimate maybe 15-20% of what we have learnt has been useful and helping us to work and perform better. The value is limited and hence why it has been scrapped.

It depends on your site. At Warton there is a flying club, gym and occasional footbale events organised, however considering there are thousands of people who work there and at Salmesbury it is very limited. Other sites are sometimes more active and graduates organise their own events too but nothing aided by BAE Systems.

No

Unless you live in an area near the site you want to work at, and want something very safe and secure but with very few thrills i would give BAE a miss. There are too many company issues and safety nets to make any forward progress and a middle management sponge layer that don't care for gradaute futures.

See question 9a, try and go for something you have a deep seated passion for and if its not working out for you or youre not enjoying it, move department. It wont get better unless youre willing to sink your teeth into an issue for at least 5 years to fix it.