The forgotten value of coupling young IT professionals with mentors.

I remember moving to a new city and starting my IT career as a graduate for a large company. I was introduced to a colleague who became my mentor. He was a tall Dutchman with that stereotype accent and a tremendous sense of purpose.

Over the months that followed he taught me so much; not just about my role, but also my industry and how to manage my career. As the relationship evolved, he also became a great friend. All the while and without me realising, I intensely threw myself at whatever was asked of me, to the benefit of the company.

I remember asking one day how I could repay him for everything he had done for me. And I remember his reply just as clearly.

“Just promise you’ll do the same for others one day.”

I held those words close throughout my career and in recent years I began to repay that debt to the current generation of young professionals. I now offer the same reply to the same question from all those years prior. Which brings me to the question at hand.

Why have so many forgotten the immense business value held in that symbiotic relationship. It can be such an effective strategy for delivering low cost business value, while introducing fresh ideas and skills into a workforce? Why have we put so much of the onus on tertiary institutions rather than ourselves as business leaders?

There is a wealth of content online describing how graduates learn faster, are more committed and in many scenarios can be a less risky prospect than senior applicants. I won’t rehash the great content out there. Instead let me draw your mind to suitable projects within your business and talk about what comes next.

Consider this

Pick a real business problem you see every day. One you’d love to remedy with a lightweight technology solution but haven’t. I’m sure your mind has immediately identified the blockers. Ok, but now challenge those with counter views:

• With rapid advances in the cloud, you probably have untapped capabilities in your current cloud services which you haven’t had have time to consider, let alone adopt.
• Your best technical people are probably at reduced efficiency because of under resourcing and can’t offload low complexity, time consuming tasks.
• Your cost per unit of person effort is probably higher than you want.
• There is a large pool of low cost, highly skilled and underutilised young talent, wanting to contribute, but going to waste due to a lack of opportunities.

Ultimately, you must decide if the sum of these perspectives is a net positive or negative for your business situation. But for many, there is a clear advantage in blending graduates back in to your organisation.

Tips for those interested

I’ve recently seen a couple of great examples of graduate programs in the Australian market. Here are some tips which I’ve seen work and which might let you dip a toe in, without committing to a potentially large and costly experiment.

1. Seek advice, start small, evolve quickly. There are still a few businesses out there with the experience to leverage graduates effectively. Access them through your networks, absorb their input and continue to do so as you develop. Try things, but don’t be afraid to change what doesn’t work. You will get better at it and it will become more cost effective as you do.
2. Pick projects which extend an existing platform or capability. The best ones are those with repeatable technology, but with a high resource cost. Forays into cloud platforms are great because the entire industry is co-evolving here anyway, so grads help keep up-skilling costs low. Business intelligence projects are another great example, especially once the core platform has been delivered, due to high testing, tuning and data quality costs. Information management portal projects with their high structural and content formation costs are yet another.
3. Use contract placements and open intentions. This helps you ring fence the lifecycle of a graduate program and limit exposure if it doesn’t work. It also lets you access more FTE than you intend to retain in your business long term, which is ok. Just be open and transparent you’re your graduates. They are getting paid to learn invaluable real world business skills, and they’ll appreciate that. But make sure you also have a plan on how to transition the best and brightest into your workforce.
4. Succession plan graduates. You’ll see greater returns if you can overlap graduate placements. They will naturally cross share skills to help each other, which will help your succession planning as much as it will help them.
5. Assign mentors outside project team. They are your safety net as much as much as they are your conduit into the mind of your graduate.
6. Blended outsourced projects? Look to suppliers you trust. If you outsource, this can present an opportunity. Find suppliers who have an established tertiary network, a track record of working with graduates and who are willing to help you run a graduate infused team. They can make great mentors too, imparting many of their skills to the graduates and indirectly to your workforce.
7. Ramp up complexity. Once a graduate proves themselves, don’t be afraid to turn up the complexity. If they are well supported, they will almost always surprise you. Remember it’s their career at stake too.

Yes, it’s not without risk, but what in business is risk free?

If you do, the result will almost certainly be invigorated teams, exposed to new ideas, approaches and skills, operating at a lower cost per unit work. You’ll also be doing something to meaningfully contribute to the future of our youth and the industry as a whole.

And you never know, you might tap in to some new business capabilities along the way.

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