First Consulting Graduate Program for Australian Graduate Training

By Steven Burrows, Senior Learning Executive, Cognizant Academy — Tue, Apr 25, 2023

The first graduate intake has just been completed by Cognizant Learning & Development ANZ for the 2023 calendar year. A new program name “Campus Graduate Program” has been adopted from 2023, which replaces the name “Generation Cognizant” (or abbreviated to “GenC” for short) from 2022 and earlier. The program was designed by local members Steven Burrows and Peter McDonald and the training was delivered also by Steven Burrows and a range of subject matter experts. This blog introduces the small cohort of four graduates and shares how the cohort ran regarding early learning, program design, topic coverage, engagement opportunities, the graduation ceremony, and feedback received.

Early Learning

Building on success from 2022, we again offered our graduates an “early engagement experience” via a separate Udemy platform to that used by Cognizant tenured associates. This provided the graduates with some optional learning opportunities whilst waiting for their first day to start. The topics were designed to complement the regular training program and not be redundant with their regular training experience. There were around 10 hours of learning, including an introduction to Cognizant, business units, the graduate training program, and consulting skills.

Introducing the Cohort

The cohort launched on Monday 13 February 2023 and ran through to Monday 27 March 2023, plus a graduation event shortly after. The smaller-than-usual group comprised of four consulting associates. We note that this is the very first time we had a consulting cohort – all previous cohorts were for technical service lines. The four members were evenly split between the Melbourne and Sydney locations with two each. This geographic spread required a full virtual delivery model, but it also did prompt us to get creative in finding other ways to create engagement.

The program design modelled agile project management techniques using agile scrum-like events, which was the approach also taken in the 2021 and 2022 intakes. This meant that the graduates and the trainer participated in all agile events for each sprint, which were five working days in length. Each sprint began with a sprint planning meeting to articulate the tasks for the sprint ahead. The tasks discussed in the meeting were recorded and maintained in Microsoft Planner as the chosen agile card wall. Throughout the sprint, updates and impediments were shared each morning during the daily scrum meetings. Then at the end of the sprint, a sprint review was conducted for associates to give practical demonstrations of their mastery of the learning materials. Immediately following this was the sprint retrospective meeting for collecting feedback.

Additional instructor-led sessions included topic overview sessions that explained and demonstrated the subject matter, which also gave opportunities for questions and answers. Beyond the instructor-led sessions, the self-paced courses were completed in between, which can be considered as a blended mode of learning given the above supports available.

All sessions facilitated by subject matter experts (SMEs) generally had a hybrid delivery mode, with the SMEs mostly present in the Melbourne or Sydney locations, and sometimes both. Facilitating for the two locations was done together over Microsoft Teams. This allowed for in-person interaction for each location for about half of the major learning activities. We also had one offshore SME from India.

Topic Coverage

The curriculum was exclusive to our consulting cohort, making the topic coverage more straight-forward compared to previous intakes that covered multiple service lines. The instructor-led components included many workshops ranging between 1 to 8 hours, allowing in-depth coverage of the subject matter. Also, the learning was supported by self-paced courses that were mostly sourced from our learning content partners including Udemy.

The learning was reinforced by knowledge-based quizzes and skill-based assessments for each sprint. The knowledge-based quizzes were multiple choice assessments hosted by our enterprise learning management system. The skill-based assessments were conducted during the sprint review meetings to demonstrate what the associates had learned in the preceding sprint. Examples of sprint review topics included (i) teaching back a summary of a particular topic, (ii) explaining how the subject matter is applicable at Cognizant, (iii) give examples of how a technology is used by others in the business, (iv) research an extension to a topic, or (v) create a visual summary of a topic. Some of the sprint reviews were done individually and others were prepared as a group activity.

Engagement Opportunities

Several noteworthy engagement opportunities featured in the program. In the first week a “Welcome to Consulting” introduction was hosted by Rakesh Garala from the ANZ consulting practice. This opportunity provided a chance for the graduates to understand the local consulting business, our consulting clients, and some initial insights on how Cognizant ANZ does consulting.

In weeks 3, 5, and 6, a series of topical consulting “bootcamps” were hosted by local SMEs. Each SME or group of SMEs took complete ownership of their topic and added their personal touch. Local contextualisation was added whenever necessary to give additional understanding to the learning materials. On some occasions, the SMEs made use of their Miro subscription to add extra interactivity to their delivery. The level of interactivity incorporated in the bootcamps was highly noteworthy and appreciated by all.

Around week 4, the leadership development workshop series delivered by Vivek Nair also included up to 13 graduates from Singapore and Malaysia from cohorts organised by our counterpart Nuramima Ram. The opportunity created larger group sizes to make it easier to justify the running of this longer series of workshops planned exclusively for graduates. For the learners, these workshops provided an opportunity for multi-national engagement and cross-cultural awareness that would otherwise not have been possible. This event was the first time the ANZ Campus Graduate Program has facilitated a training opportunity with multi-national engagement in its history.

Also during week 5, our corporate functions hosted a graduate multi-cohort connect event, where all graduates from the 2021, 2022 and 2023 intakes to date were invited to spend time together. This opportunity allowed for introductions that may not otherwise be possible for the graduates deployed to external client premises on billable projects. The fun activity “two truths and a lie” was used to help all graduates to get to know one another better and pizza was had by all!

Graduation Ceremony

The graduation ceremony is becoming a regular event the celebrate the conclusion of each Campus Graduate Program in ANZ. The stakeholders invited included senior leadership, consulting leaders, SMEs, corporate functions, Asia-Pacific colleagues, the graduates themselves, and others. This one-hour event covered the program design, program outcomes, experiences of the graduates (spoken by all four of our graduates), leadership notes (spoken by George Evans, Justin Wilkes, Rakesh Garala and Brad Hester), the awards ceremony, and acknowledgments.

The awards comprised some individual awards for exceptional individual performance in areas such as being the “quiz champion” based on quiz results or the “most valuable player” as voted by the SMEs. We also acknowledged the overall graduation from the training program, which all members of the cohort successfully completed. The expectations to graduate required participation in the instructor-led sessions, completion of the self-paced training courses, passing the knowledge-based quizzes, demonstrated understanding of the material in the weekly sprint reviews, and active participation.

Conclusion

The quantitative feedback came from the per-topic feedback surveys, where the effectiveness of the instructor, courseware, environment, support, and overall rating were measured. The scores we received from the five-point Likert scale question categories are summarised below. These surveys also had a question on the Net Promotor Score (NPS), as a measure of customer satisfaction. The survey respondents were asked how likely they would recommend this training to their colleagues on a ten-point scale. All metrics significantly exceeded our benchmark targets of Likert = 4.35 and NPS = 40 as shown below.

The feedback also included a qualitative component collected from both the sprint retrospectives and the topic feedback surveys. Feedback about things that worked well coming from the sprint retrospectives included ability to build support networks, teach-back presentations to reinforce learning, the Miro platform, and the graduate networking event. We also collected a lot of feedback from the topic feedback surveys, including comments about the regular trainer engagement, the inclusive and accommodating approach, program organisation, and interactive activities. Finally, we also asked all graduates to share their feedback directly with the broader Cognizant community using testimonials that we have repeated below.

Conclusion

Cognizant Learning & Development ANZ handed the baton to the consulting practice after the conclusion of the training, for the graduates to onboard and transition to their next responsibilities. Some stretch learning options were also provided so that any gaps could be filled in the intervening period. The stretch learning included suggestions for domain learning, topic deep dives, performance management, and industry certification among others.

Steven and Peter from Cognizant Learning & Development ANZ thank Talent Acquisition, People & Culture, our SMEs, the consulting practice, senior leadership, and others, for helping to make the program successful. At time of writing, there are further intakes planned for the ANZ Campus Graduate Program in 2023 scheduled to start later in the year. We are expecting some more consulting graduates plus many technical graduates across up to seven service lines. Work is already underway to make the necessary changes for the next cohorts.