It’s 25 years, almost to the day, since I started at the Financial Times. “One tip,” confided a more experienced colleague, early on: “Don’t stay more than five years, or you’ll be here for ever.”
The miracle, however, is not that I’m still here but that the graduate training programme is – alongside much larger versions operated by bigger companies, from Accenture to Zurich Insurance.
Such programmes face many threats, however. Companies face accusations that they hire graduate trainees as cheap labour. But the opposite risk worries boardrooms more: that such programmes are a costly investment in all-too-mobile assets. According to one more recent FT trainee, his contemporaries in other schemes regard their apprenticeship with “utter cynicism”, as a way of gaining the imprimatur of, say, a Big Four accountancy firm, before moving on to something trendier. Those who do stay risk becoming the most insular followers of a restrictive management culture – a charge laid against the BBC in a recent review of the missteps that eventually triggered the departure of the broadcaster’s director-general George Entwistle, himself a BBC lifer and former graduate trainee.