Graduate Engineer Review

Enriching and enlightening, developing engineering experience across wide array of secondments with unique world-first engineering challenges and major projects with CapEx in the £Bn's at the birthplace of UK nuclear. Across my secondments, I gained exposure to the full (nuclear) lifecycle from concept- and detailed-design, to construction, commissioning, operation, post-operational clean out and decommissioning.

4x rotations: 2x plant-facing, 1x design , 1x reliability
Plant-facing: faster-paced work packages with high turnover rate for modifications tied to immediate operations, facilitating design modifications and emergent maintenance.
Design: medium timescale, more detailed work packages related to commissioning, plant operability, creating deliverables for design modifications (which are to be applied/carried out by plant-facing teams)
Reliability: work packages related to a longer term, strategic view of assets.

Good compensation for the current job market (as of 2025), on par with expectations for nuclear, package as a whole is more competitive compared with similar graduate schemes in energy, defence, infrastructure and building services due to the more remote location.
Stated salary is base salary (excluding bonus), for the total comp: graduates receive company-wide bonus scheme.
Discounts available for some gyms, etc. Work from home/agile working depends on team/department but uncommon for site- and plant-facing teams.

Assigned the following:
1. Graduate buddy - from the previous cohort/intake, on the same pathway, i.e., engineering, finance, etc)
2. Mentor - chartered with the same professional institution the mentee (i.e., you) will be seeking chartership for, e.g., IMechE, IChemE, etc
3. Senior coordinator - similar to mentor but oversees all graduates within profession/discipline, e.g., all graduates aligned to IMechE but not necessarily on the same pathway (i.e., construction, commissioning and technical are different pathways but graduates from all three can be aligned to IMechE/IChemE if they are mechanical/chemical.

would be 4/5 but organisation is quite rigid with fixed start-times and work locations - meaning transport, traffic and commuting at rush-hour can be a hassle which could be avoided with some flexibility/pragmatism.

Company mission is very unique, hard-to-replicate and refreshing - arguably the most complex nuclear site with one-off engineering challenges that are not driven by profit or shareholders, but progress and safety.
The approach to tackling these problems could be described as slow/traditional. Many graduates do cite the organisation as being old-fashioned in some ways, especially related to work culture, technology, IT, hybrid-working arrangements, mandating site-based rigidity in location and start time even for office-based work (i.e., not plant-facing).
Though ex-graduates in the company tend to be excellent to learn from, regardless of if they are assigned to you as a mentor; and they tend to have a more modern approach to work culture, the similarities in background can go a long way in establishing a welcoming culture.

Organisation is vocal about their progressiveness, which is largely true, any isolated events that have occurred which are contrary to this progress are from line-managers that are less modern or with dissimilar backgrounds - higher probability to have differing views on work culture.

Yes

very unique problems and nuclear-facing graduate scheme, plenty of mentors and senior engineers to learn from

neutral 3/5 - recruitment staff tend not to have expertise in the graduate pathways/disciplines but this is true for most recruitment staff at other companies too.