HR Graduate Review

I am responsible for managing employee relations cases, such as disciplinaries and grievances, monitoring employee absence levels, running engagement events and rolling out new wellbeing services like our new on-site physio. Day-to-day I get involved with numerous meetings, emails and other administrative tasks to help ensure all departments and managers remain compliant with our policies particularly holiday.

I have been able to develop existing skills such as; confidence and knowledge using excel, confidence in presenting and communicating with key stakeholders and in meetings and managing all stages of engagement events. I have also learnt new skills around how best to communicate with colleagues who have limited English as this is not something I had as much exposure to in previous roles.

I find the CIPD programme very enjoyable. I feel this has greatly helped with building on existing knowledge and HR skills and has also provided a theoretical base of knowledge which I can draw on for my work. The wellbeing and reward workshops have been the most important for me as these are the most relevant for my role.

I feel that the programme is fairly well organised and structured. I like that the workshop powerpoints are split and clearly labelled for each assignment question they relate to, I also feel it is very useful that we were given workshop and assignment deadlines at the beginning of the programme to plan our time. It would be useful to have more frequent but shorter meetings (5-10 mins) with our lead trainers to be able to ask any questions without waiting until our progress reviews.

I feel I receive a fair level of support from my employer. I feel that I am sometimes able to plan my time well enough that I have the opportunity to complete my work and meet all my deadlines, however, I am not always able to do this during work time and use a lot of evenings/ weekends to get this completed.

I feel the support from our training providers is fairly limited outside of our progress reviews and workshops. It would be useful to have more regular catch-ups with our trainers as it is not always very easy or quick to get email responses when I have a query about a particular topic.

I feel this has massively helped with my performance in my role, this has given me the skills and knowledge which underpin all aspects of a HR role. The most helpful topics have been the reward and wellbeing workshops as these have given me the theoretical knowledge to analyse the offering at my own organisation and suggest improvements.

There are a number of activities which my organisation offer for colleagues to get involved with. For example at our London site we run an annual cricket event and every factory based in London (we have 4) has 2 teams which compete to win against each other. Colleagues can sign up to play or attend to watch the games.

Yes

I feel this is a fast-paced company which provides lots of opportunity to gain exposure to new things and develop your confidence, skills and knowledge. I also think that employee wellbeing is very important at Bakkavor, in particular at the London sites which average a wellbeing or engagement event every 1.5 weeks.

The chilled food industry is naturally very fast-paced and can be subject to change very often for many different reasons. Based on this you would need to be motivated, resilient and open to change or new experiences to work at Bakkavor. Flexibility is also very important as employees often move sites or departments to climb the career path.