Capita Novus Graduate Scheme - Software Development
Pros
- Access to Pluralsight and O'Reilly to aid learning. - Chilling with other grads on the day-to-day, doing barely any work, while being able to tell family and friends that you're on a graduate scheme. - Looks decent on CV, although in practice, not a lot was learned for 6 months of time. This is something your prospective employer will find out once you're nowhere near as good as somebody who's done 6 months of full-time training. - If you're coming straight out of University, where you dossed around for 3 years, it can be nice bridge between University and full-time 9-5 employment, as the training is 3 days per week for the first 8 weeks, and isn't quite as demanding as real job. - The training is unpaid, which isn't good enough as training can (and all too often does) last four months. - Travel expenses to attend training paid at £100 per week for the first 16 weeks. - Travel expenses to interviews paid.
Cons
- The myth of the guaranteed job. When Capita, on the assessment day, are presenting the opportunity to you, they are careful not to guarantee that you will get placed with one of their clients, but they operate on the assumption that you will get a job. They talk about your prospective job as if it WILL happen, and it would be a total freak-occurrence if you weren't to get one. This just isn't true. There's no guarantee of a job. A couple of us didn't get placed after being unsuccessful at only a 4-6 interviews. You are then removed from the scheme after 6 months. This is damaging, because you get on the scheme, stop applying for *actual* graduate schemes, and then 6 months later, you've missed the window for graduate schemes and have been kicked out of Capita. - The training is barely existent. You have to teach yourself. As long as you're pretending to do work, nobody will bat an eyelid. You can choose your topic of learning - There's no structure of what you will learn. You don't have to prove your understanding of anything you've supposed to have learned. You can turn up and pretend to study, day after day. This sounds almost attractive, until you realise you've spent the last 6 months pretending to watch tutorials on Pluralsight and mindlessly scrolling through guides on W3 schools. - Geo-flexible. Capita are not transparent about the sorry nature of the job-security and training (mentioned above) but they are open about your need to be geo-flexible throughout the entirety of the two years you're on the programme. Nevertheless, I feel it's important to touch on how much of a problem this is. You will have to be willing to move anywhere in the UK for two years, not to mention interview anywhere in the UK. They can send you down to London, up to Glasgow, across to Bristol, back up to Edinburgh. All the while, you have to comply. You can't say "I don't want to work in Glasgow, so I'm not attending this interview." without getting promptly kicked off the scheme. Your job may end after working for a client for 3 months, and you'll get sent somewhere else. There's no reason why not, in theory, you could be shifted to every corner of the UK over the two years of the scheme. Capita do sell you this with a "Most of our grads get placed for at least 6 months at a time" which is still 4 different locations over two years. - Process of getting a job. You submit your CV for the scheme, then have a phone interview, then attend a 7.5 hour assessment day, with coding tests, group exercises (the humiliating "build the tallest spaghetti castle you can"), you then create and deliver an impromptu presentation, have an interview with the trainer. You then may receive an offer, but don't be fooled into thinking you've done enough interviewing to get a job. You then, over the next 16 weeks are sent all over the Country to clients, to do yet more interviews. I even had to do another online coding test for a client before interviewing with them (although in practice I failed the coding test). It is then when you find out that you went through this whole application process so far, to attain the position of: "We're willing to send you to our clients to interview". Regardless of the company, the project you'll be working on, the location, you HAVE to attend all interviews they get for you, otherwise you're kicked off. - Total lack of transparency between sales and trainees. This is key because it's the sales team which "sell" you to clients. They book you into interviews. They're your chance of getting an actual *paying* job. And there is 0 communication between you and sales. You have no idea if there's any opportunities coming up, or how many clients they're in contact with. You're not even sure what the CV is that they're sending over to clients. There can be errors on your CV (there was on mine), although you have to write most of it yourself. You can be there on week 12, having been unemployed for the last 3 months, not with the faintest clue of when your next interview is going to be (not to mention *where* it will be). You find yourself awkwardly entering the main office and standing over the sales team, politely interrupting them to ask "Anything coming up in terms of interviews for me, I'm on week 12 have only attended one?".
