Traineeships exceeding customer expectations

Programmed is the sole provider of traineeships to a leading Australian telecommunications company.

Throughout the year we recruit for a variety of traineeships across multiple departments. Traineeships can be from 9 – 24 months, and can be for a Certificate II, III or IV in telecommunications and Certificate III in Information, Digital Media and Technology. The traineeship types range from residential and enterprise field technicians, rigging technicians, construction and designing technicians and see our trainees work on our customer’s copper, wireless and optical fiber network.

In early 2015, we were asked to recruit around 70 trainees across 6 different traineeships: Network Delivery Field Technician, Construction Design, NBN Delivery Design, Global Satellite, Rigging and National Fibre – Plant Operator trainees.

Programmed has well defined processes in place for recruiting trainees for our customer, including manual and phone screening, aptitude testing (which has been structured specifically for apprentices and trainees), and interviews with our recruitment consultants and our customers. We have set a high pass mark on the aptitude test to ensure candidates are of the highest quality.

For this recruitment drive, as well as standard advertising for each traineeship, we posted additional expression of interest advertisements under different industry categories (such as education and administration) to capture a wider pool of potential candidates, and to attract more women to the roles.

Over 10 Programmed staff worked on this recruitment drive, including national recruitment centre staff and state-based field officers who conducted face-to-face interviews. The field officers also support the Programmed trainees throughout their traineeships.

Despite over 4,000 people applying for traineeships, Programmed completed the recruitment drive in less than 2 months. Due to the high calibre of the candidates recruited, our customer opened up extra positions in locations where they had originally only offered single positions.

Responding to our customer’s requirement to achieve greater diversity in its workforce, 33% of the trainees recruited were women. In regard to this achievement, our customer wrote: “Just a note to thank you and your team on the great work and initiatives Programmed have put in place with the trainee programme that have assisted us in meeting the reporting provisions of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012. The trainee programme is going to be one of the main drivers of uplift in our gender diversity moving forward. The results of the changes in the recruitment initiatives that have been used in FY15 to provide the significant increase in female trainees have been recognised internally at executive levels.”