Aon
Graduate Development Programme
Aon Corporation is a leading global provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital consulting. Through its 36,000 professionals worldwide, Aon provide their clients with innovative and effective risk management and workforce productivity solutions.
Aim
Sustainability is key to Aon’s business strategy. Aon chose Impact UK to work with them to ensure that this theme was central to their graduate development programme.
Objective
In partnership with Aon, Impact designed an innovative and sustainable programme that will attract, develop and retain their graduates. The programme focuses on:
• Aligning all the graduates to the core business strategy and minimising silo mentality
• Developing leadership capability against newly introduced cross-functional leadership competencies
• Raising awareness of CSR and modelling sustainable business practice and thinking – both are key strategic drivers and a source of competitive advantage for Aon
• Building trust and enhancing career development – two important areas identified in Aon’s employee survey.
Solution
In order to ensure the long-term success of the programme, a process was defined that would engage different layers of the organisation. In order to provide graduates with high level support pre and post programme it was necessary to engage graduates and their line managers, senior managers and board members.
Line manager support
Two experiential sessions were designed to engage the graduate’s line managers with the business need and thinking behind the programme. It was important that the first event gave them an opportunity to question, challenge and input into the design process. The second session focused on developing participative and directive coaching skills so that managers had the tools and processes to support the graduates’ development and generate high performance back in the business.
Senior manager support
In parallel to the line manager events, Impact worked with a select group of senior managers to enhance their group facilitation skills. The purpose of this was two-fold, to improve each manager’s effectiveness in the business and to prepare them for their own challenge - coaching, challenging and focusing a team of graduates through their business project.
Board member input
The graduates’ learning journey was to include a real business project. In order to generate projects closely aligned to the business needs, we invited board members to submit ‘sustainability themed’ ideas, which, if successful, would increase revenue and/or reduce costs.
Learning journey
Launch event
For the Aon graduates their learning journey began in London with a high impact launch event involving a series of fun and challenging team activities that set expectations, generated momentum and allowed them to network cross-functionally. The event included a day of interactive and thought provoking projects that explored sustainability and how this topic relates to Aon as an insurance broker. These projects allowed graduates to practice effective team working before the launch of the business projects.
The graduates then met with the board members, who presented an overview of the business projects and hosted a Q&A session. Then it was over to the graduates to choose which projects they wanted to work on and to form project teams.
Residential event
Three months later Impact invited the graduates and the senior managers to the Lake District for a three-day experiential offsite. The programme included classic outdoor management development exercises focussing on team skills. The graduates were also challenged to deliver a local community project, develop personal awareness in self-disclosure sessions and practiced giving and receiving feedback whilst reviewing and re-focusing the work of their project teams to date.
At the time of writing the business projects are ongoing, with completion anticipated in October 2009. The findings and results will then be presented back to key stakeholders and exceptional achievements will be rewarded and hopefully, implemented back into the business.
Result
To date, there has been a noticeable change in mindset with graduates taking a more proactive approach to their work, constructively challenging and asking questions within the business and displaying a key interest in other functions and departments. Over the last six months networking opportunities have been maximised both amongst peers and senior business leaders.
Aon facilitators have been at the heart of the process, evaluating not only the graduates learning progress, but also their own development experience.
"I cannot thank you enough for your efforts, both individually and collectively over the last year. It has been exciting to re-energise the graduate programme and take it to a completely different level - and we could not have achieved any of this without you - the Impact team."
Ruth Robertson
Head of Learning and Development and co-designer of the programme
Further information
Read more about Impact's approach to Graduate Development
Read more about Impact's Community Action Learning methodology
