With grad scheme start dates on the horizon, we’re sure there’s a huge focus on giving graduates and early career employees the skills they need to succeed. But if the managers around them aren’t equipped to support that development, or more experienced employees are working to a completely different set of expectations, you risk creating a bigger disconnect across the business.
There’s not one trigger that starts this disconnect. But as people enter the workplace at very different times, with very different experiences and expectations, they are expected to work together without anyone helping to bridge the gap.
Many companies expect graduates to adapt to the way the business already works. Instead, we should be asking what both sides need to do differently. That means giving early talent the tools to navigate the workplace, while also making sure managers and the wider business are equipped to support, communicate with and learn from them too.
“Teams cohere around shared goals, not shared birth years. Make the ‘why’ visible and important to everyone.”
With a new cohort coming in, there are three areas we’d focus on from day one:
Develop the managers as well as the grads
Protect development and make its value clear
Think beyond the grad cohort
Develop the managers as well as the grads
Your graduate programme might be brilliant, but managers need the skills and confidence to support it too. That means understanding what their grads are being taught, how to give effective feedback and the role managers themselves play in turning that learning into day-to-day development.
And development can be as simple as a manager taking five minutes after a meeting to explain what went well, giving context around why someone has been given a particular task, or connecting that work back to a development goal.
Finally, there’s often a misconception that working with early talent means lowering standards to meet their (supposed) needs. In reality, getting the best out of any team member, not just early talent, is about setting high standards, upholding those standards and creating psychological safety for people to try, fail and learn.
Protect development and make its value clear
Sometimes the disconnect starts with something as simple as how development is viewed. If a graduate is pulled out of training because their manager needs something done, what does that tell them about how much the business really values their development?
If you’ve invested in a programme, managers need to see that development isn’t time away from someone’s ‘real job’. It needs to be framed as part of how they get really, really good at the job, fast.
There’s a longer-term business case too. If organisations struggle to develop and retain their early talent, they’re not only dealing with turnover today. They could be reducing the pipeline of people ready to step into management tomorrow, leaving roles to be filled internally by people who aren't ready yet, or externally at a much higher cost.
Think beyond the grad cohort
Remember development needs to connect three groups:
Early talent
The managers supporting them
Experienced hires and employees across the wider business.
Which means creating opportunities for people at different career stages to learn from each other, while recognising that different generations may have entered the workplace with very different expectations around communication, feedback and progression.
It’s helpful to understand the context of different generations, avoid assuming everyone of the same age wants the same thing. Individualise, don’t generalise: use 1:1s and team conversations to understand each person rather than what their generation supposedly wants.
But closing the gap shouldn’t mean trying to make everyone work in the same way. Those differences are part of the value early talent brings.
They can bring digital fluency that helps more experienced colleagues get to grips with new technology, a fresh perspective that challenges assumptions the business may have stopped questioning, and a directness that can surface what isn’t working before it becomes a bigger problem. And having entered adulthood through a period of huge disruption, adaptability is often one of their strengths too.
This is two-way. You bring institutional knowledge, context and professional judgement. They bring digital capability, fresh thinking and energy. Together, you are powerful.
That’s the opportunity. Rather than seeing the gap between generations as something that needs to be eliminated, think about how you can create the conditions for both sides to learn from each other.
Get early talent, managers and the wider workforce moving in the same direction and start seeing long-term results.
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