Career development

We pride ourselves on employing the best. In return, we offer a career at the cutting edge of technology.

Whether you're an engineer or a project manager; whether you're a finance or HR professional, no other British employer offers you the chance to develop your skills and progress your career, working on projects such as Eurofighter or Astute class submarines.

Development from day one

It's inspiring to hear our most experienced, most brilliant engineers - people who've turned dreams like a supersonic aircraft and vertical take-off fighter into reality - talk about how they still learn something new every day.

As for you, your learning and training starts the same day you do. Your line manager will help you focus on your department and role. And within one month, you'll attend an event that focuses on the first two levels of an induction process: company and local.

Developing you

Personal Development Reviews (PDR)

Formal performance development reviews take place at least twice a year. If you've never experienced them in your previous role, they're nothing to get nervous about. They're a good thing. They give (not you are given but you agree) you clear and measurable objectives focused on business targets - and they let you know what you'll need to do to achieve your goals.

Personal Development Objectives

By reviewing how you've achieved against these objectives, we'll be able to give you feedback on your performance, as well as essential information for development and career planning decisions.

Your learning: our approach.

Whether it's engineering, finance, HR or procurement, we maintain our edge by developing all our people. People just like you.

To achieve our business objectives, we depend on your skills, your innovative ideas and your contribution. We aim to get the best from you by treating you with respect, creating a supportive work environment, and providing you with all the opportunities for training and development (to support your aspirations and the business requirements) we can.

In doing so, we'll continually help you to grow by developing your skills, your knowledge, and your confidence. And you'll have a hand in designing opportunities for your learning in line with the needs of our business. After all, this is what helps us meet challenges facing our company both now and in the future.

You'll find that we'll encourage you to have positive attitudes and behaviours that encourage you to learn, share that learning with others, and use it to the company's benefit. And to help make this happen, you'll find that your line manager will help:

• Ensure that you have the required level of knowledge and skill to perform your role and deliver against your objectives
• Encourage you to develop within your current role
• Identify, and help you to fulfill your potential
• Create an environment for learning culture by providing you with development opportunities

Learning - it's easy when you know how

You can break down your development into:

• Personal (Ie. Presentation skills)
  
• Functional
  
• Leadership and management (L&D)
  

And to support your growth in these different areas, we're pioneering the use of an Intelligent Learning Portal online.

This gives you easy access to know how in the shape of more than 400 e-courses you can take on your desktop, in the nearest Learning Resource Centre, or from home. And you can even get your loved ones to join in. All courses are available to family members, free of charge.

Skills programmes

In addition to the core performance management and personal development processes, we also operate a number of specific processes and programmes to ensure we have the right skills to manage our business.

Developing your potential

Performance Centred Leadership (PCL)

Within the Leadership and Management area is the Performance Centred Leadership Framework. This includes leadership development programmes both within each business and across the group as a whole, delivered by leading providers. And this is one of the ways we develop a culture of high performance that can positively influence our business performance, the way we deal with our customers, manage our suppliers and develop the people who work for us.

'Developing You' Frameworks

A robust, highly developed framework for all

Frameworks for all our major Business Functions help us all define in detail the skills, competencies and knowledge required to deliver functional capability. Take engineering, for an example:

Engineering Developing You (EDY)

We provide frameworks for every function. Of course, engineering is so central to what we do, it's particularly important we continually improve our performance by developing our people in this area.

"Engineering Developing You" provides a framework to over 30, 000 engineers that helps to map engineering capability to individuals' career aspirations and BAE Systems' business needs. It provides the basis for training and development solutions that will deliver the engineering capability we need to be successful.

EDY Objectives

• Co-ordinate engineering career development within a common framework
• Maximise the efficiency of engineering development across BAE Systems
• Support the use of common engineering processes and language
• Ensure the development matches business strategy
• Establish EDY "brand" as benchmark best-in-class development

The EDY framework is made up of three elements

• The career map
• The competency framework
• Training and development solutions

The EDY Framework is applicable to all engineering staff regardless of their background or original discipline. BAE SYSTEMS formally recognises 6 disciplines of engineering.

These six disciplines are:

• Systems Engineering
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering
• Software Engineering
• Mechanics and Structures Engineering
• Manufacturing Engineering
• Support Engineering

The EDY Framework is concerned with systematic managed career development throughout the working life of a BAE Systems engineer.  It is equally applicable to graduates, and engineering directors, and all the career stages in between.

Performance Management

Twice a year, we carry out reviews in two areas:

Leadership

Each business and each function review and identify next career moves

Our Executive Committee also conducts Management Resource Reviews that assess the strengths and development needs of our leaders.

It helps develop anyone in a leadership position so that they meet business and individual needs.

Function

We also carry out resource reviews to identify strengths and weaknesses in each of our functions. As well as considering each one in isolation, these reviews also look at issues from one function that could affect another.