Building Business skills on the Ceox Graduate Programme
With Ceox’s reputation growing and our customer base increasing, developing our team will always be a key component of our business strategy. Started in 2021, our Graduate Programme has been an outstanding success. We have run two programmes with early phases focussing on understanding Ceox ways of working and refining and learning technical skills with a focus on Microsoft Certifications in Dynamics 365, Power Platform and wider Microsoft Technology stack. The online Microsoft learning runs concurrently with internal, Agile run software development projects to give the team further experience of software development in a realistic project environment. Subsequently, we gradually introduce the Graduate Developers onto our established development projects. With the latest Graduate Programme intakes we have supported the aforementioned early phases with 6 training days covering broader professional and business skills.
The professional development sessions were run by Mike Smith of Ripley Training and whilst based on face-to-face classroom sessions in Ceox’s offices in Shalford the sessions also included a mix of interactive workshops, paper exercises, team building events and presentations. The Programme was developed by both Mike at Ripley Training and the Ceox Leadership Team and evolved over the six months based on individual and business needs. The programme provided the graduate team with a number of key professional and business skills to enable them to grow and succeed in their existing roles and beyond. The programme included a number of interactive practical and group exercises to help the graduates apply the learning and provide an excellent opportunity to build stronger team working skills. Mike Smith, the Trainer and Workshop Facilitator said, “It was a real pleasure to lead the programme with such an enthusiastic team of professionals”.
The training days involved all the team and covered:
Communicating with Confidence and Personal Impact - included how to create a good first impression and communicate effectively.
Time and Prioritisation Management - explored techniques for gaining greater control over time with more structured and planned approaches for managing interruptions, priorities, processes and people.
Team Working Skills - helped the team enhance their team working skills to improve effectiveness and productivity.
Presentation Skills – enabled team members to understand the needs of their audience and become more confident and skilled in presenting.
Project Management Skills – provided the Graduate Developers with an understanding of the role of project management including defining the Project, Setting Objectives, Scoping & Identifying Constraints, Risk Assessments and Contingency Planning, Estimating Time and Costs, Controlling and Tracking the progress of projects.
Embedded within the 6 days training was the opportunity to review progress and discuss their personal development plans. We’ve already seen the benefits of the course in the workplace and on customer engagements and the team found the training thoroughly entertaining.
“Great programme over the six days. Learnt a lot from the training, Thanks.” Ceox Graduate.