Employers: How To Successfully Manage Your New Graduate

Employing a graduate can be a brilliant choice for a lot of businesses – they’re fresh out of university with lots of new ideas and growth potential. What’s not to love? That said; a new graduate isn’t like your typical employee because they’ll need a bit more guidance with it being their first ‘proper’ job.

Graduates are full of potential; you just need to make sure you encourage them to put ideas forward and progress. It can seem like a bit of a chore employing a new graduate, but if you’re organised about it, it can really help to enhance your business. To help you get your graduate started, we’ve come up with our top four ways to successfully manage them!

Set Up A Plan

When your graduate first walks through the doors, they’re probably going to feel like a lost sheep – so you need to make sure you give them some direction. Before they start, have a think about what you want them to achieve in the first six months – then break it down week by week.

This way, when your new graduate starts they’ve got a clear idea of what’s in store for them – you can then have a meeting at the start of each week and outline what you want them to do. It’ll make your life so much easier this way because you won’t have to keep thinking of things they could do. It will also encourage your graduate to work independently because they’ve been set a series of tasks at the start of the week.

Provide Training

You want to make the most out of your new graduate, so make sure you train them up and enhance their skills. This will benefit you in the long run because you can mould your new graduate into the dream employee – so make sure you put a bit of time and money into it.

You’ll probably think about training when you’re setting up the plan – it should be a fairly gradual process because they’ll probably need to learn about the basics first, depending on their previous experience.

Give Them Attainable Goals

You obviously want to push your graduate and make sure that they fulfil their potential – but you don’t want to give them unattainable goals, because they’re just going to feel like they’re fighting a losing battle.

It might be that you need to keep reviewing your plan if the graduate is struggling to keep up. They’re a lot more likely to produce quality work if you’ve given them manageable goals – remember, this is a completely new experience for them so don’t overwhelm them too much.

Assign A Mentor To Them

You want to make sure that your graduate has clear guidance, so assign an employee to manage them and answer any questions or worries. You want to try to create some consistency, rather than every man and his dog asking the graduate to do lots of different things.

The mentor can manage the tasks that need to be done and make sure the graduate isn’t bombarded with loads of things to do. This will benefit you in the long run because they’ll know that someone is monitoring their work rate. It also means that someone is there to check for any mistakes – like it or not, they’ll have a few slip-ups to start with – it’s how they learn!

Employers: How To Successfully Manage Your New Graduate