Yorkshire Water

How many of you would guess that “the best place to work in IT” in 2008 was a water company in Bradford? Yorkshire Water topped the “Best of the Best” awards in Computer Weekly that year, giving a clue that the image of a slow paced, bureaucratic utility company is well out of date.

Giving up the chance to be schmoozed by the finance sector, this year I volunteered to go on the employer visit to a water treatment plant in Leeds*. Unfortunately the visit to the sewage works in Bradford was cancelled, which spared our noses (they’re up front about it – yup, it does smell) but meant I lost out on a good anecdote.

How not to take a photo of people in high visibility tabards - against a lit background (Come on, I'm a careers adviser, not a photographer!)

There’s a lot of inside info we can pick up on these visits, so here’s some of the official information plus some things you might not find on their website.

The Corporate Stuff

Yorkshire Water supply fresh water and treate waste water in the Yorkshire area. They also have contract operations outside their region, including in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, through Kelda Water Services. They have a number of business units and if you’re interested in the water industry, it’s best to know which does what:

• Water business unit – provides clean water to customers (tend to be more engineering and science vacancies in these operational roles).
• Environmental business unit – deals with waste water. Yes, they do mean sewage, not environmental strategy.
• Regulatory and Investment – this is the strategic business unit, lots of dealing with legislation, liaising with government, managing assets including SSSIs and nature reserves as part of their major land holdings (this is the bit for environmental strategy if that’s what you’re after). Just looking for a good degree, not a specific discipline here (eg Erica, the Zoologist from Manchester 2008 who did a great job of organising the day for us).
• IT business unit – lots on networks and development of ruggedised mobile technology to be used out in the field, as well as the usual support services. It’s techie “get your hands dirty” IT rather than business analysis, so you’ll either need an IT degree or another degree with reasonable IT content (such as science or engineering).
• Kelda Water Services – these operations cover commercial contracts such as PFI and Public Private Partnership waste management services, but also includes novel projects such as those looking at “energy from waste” plants. This is the unit which seems to employ lots of scientists, including postgrads.

Employing Graduates and Postgraduates

Their “Graduate Programme” is one of those deluxe schemes where you get two years of placements, a mentor, a buddy who will be a recent grad and will be in touch from the time you get an offer (so you can ask what you wear on your first day etc) and loads of development opportunities. In most placements you get responsibility from day 1, but there are a few safeguards – Tom who was working in the water treatment works pointed out that you weren’t allowed to push buttons unsupervised “in case you poison half of Leeds”.

This year they’re open for applications from mid September, with a closing date of 10th January. Interestingly, they say they’re not planning to close the scheme early if they have enough applications. The first stage of their assessment will be 4-9th March, with a second stage on 23rd/24th March. This is in contrast to many other employers, such as National Grid who visited us recently, where it’s a good idea to get your application in as early as possible.

The downside? They took 10 people last year and are planning on taking 12 this year.

However, there are lots more graduates working in the business. In fact, several of the graduates and postgrads we met on the scheme were already working for Yorkshire Water or other employers when they applied for the programme. The oldest person they’d had on the programme was in their forties. I met several masters postgrads and apparently one of our PhDs is due to start work on the graduate scheme any day now.

Hints For Getting In

A lot of it’s familiar but worth re-iterating (as it’s how most people fail):

• Answer the question you’ve been asked. In other words, cutting and pasting your standard answer for “the teamwork question” means you might as well have saved your time and not bothered applying.
• Think about what sets you apart, not just your degree (as all other applicants will also have one).
• Do your research on the organisation and the industry, but don’t just regurgitate facts. They want to know why you’re interested in eg. the “One Million Green Fingers” campaign (their volunteer efforts to create gardens in schools), rather than how many sewage works they have. To find out about Yorkshire Water (or any other organisation) think of their stakeholders, regulators, what’s in the local media – not just what’s on their graduate recruitment website.

What do they value? Respect for diversity, taking responsibility and being resourceful, usual “self motivation” and “team player” approaches, but I wasn’t expecting the continual improvement and customer focus to be so prominent in a utility company which is essentially a monopoly – and it did seem to be genuine.

Other Ways In

It’s becoming more and more true that these schemes are the management fast-track, and lots of other “graduate calibre” vacancies exist in businesses, particularly for specialist skills of interest to postgrads. One career strategy could be to get into a company through their generally advertised vacancies, develop your skills (and business confidence) and apply for the graduate scheme in a couple of years, if you don’t make it first time round.

Lasting Impressions

These are some of the random things which struck me, and which give you a flavour of the organisation:

• Your mentor is chosen specifically to give you a different perspective to your normal view – very interesting philosophy.
• They’re all very “Yorkshire and proud of it” – even the Londoners (and what’s wrong with that? OK, I’ll admit it, guess where I’m from?)
• One perk for grads is that you sometimes get to go to festivals – I think it’s part of their support for WaterAid. You just need to get in early, first one to volunteer gets to be dressed up as a tap, otherwise you’re wandering round a field dressed as a toilet…
• Biggest hint for new employees – never, ever bring commercially bottled water to work (they do take their Yorkshire Water seriously).
• Wherever we went, which included offices, coffee areas and treatment works, people were smiling – not in a corporate clone way (unlike some companies I’ve visited). They were just, well, normal and friendly – which says a lot.

*Why do we visit employers?

A number of employers each year invite careers advisers to visit, to tell us about their upcoming jobs and in the hope that we’ll promote their schemes or even, for a few companies, that we’ll hand pick “the best” of the year’s crop of students and recommend them to the company we’ve visited. In practice, this conflicts with our independent role (so we quietly ignore any exhortations to recommend them), but it does give us the chance to give you some inside info on places we’ve visited which you may not get on their recruitment website. Most importantly, we get a feel for the culture of the organisations which is often a crucial factor in whether you’d like to work there. Then you can make up your own mind.

The worst employer visits are the ones where they’re badly organised, throw lots of corporate info at us (would a presentation on sponsorship of the Olympics really figure highly in how you choose your employer?) and leave details like how many people they’re planning to recruit as a rushed afterthought or even “we’ll e-mail you later”.

Luckily Yorkshire Water avoided all this by getting the recent graduate recruits to organise the day, and giving us ample chance to ask questions of HR, recent grads and senior managers.