The Graduate Development Programme
Pros
Interesting projects on paper and the opportunity to work with schools and universities.
Cons
An extremely dull day to day experience with little to no challenging work for most starters in the company (reading documents for a couple of weeks is normal). A varied and unequal experience across all sites and countries makes it feel even less fair (see the variety in the reviews here). Advertised as a competitive working environment with technical training although this is non-existent for the first few years. The projects and the process (although this could be endemic to the industry) is so complex that I am not surprised by the non-profitable nature of the company and the inability to meet deadlines or budgets. If you would like a foot in the door and to develop just enough so that you can be poached by another company then go for it. Otherwise stick around for four or five years in order to get noticed and perhaps be given something interesting to work on. Starting on a team or in the company in general is fairly daunting with no real integration or "team spirit", it's actually a really demotivating working environment on the most part and it's very hard to feed this back to upper management. A lot of the day is spent chasing up expenses and problems regarding HR as they seem to be overworked however this doesn't make it easy when emails and phone calls go unanswered for weeks.
