Commercial Graduate Review

I had a fantastic experience on the National Gas Graduate Scheme. I was able to tailor my scheme according to my preferences, choosing the team that I rotated in myself and gaining valuable experience across three varied departments. I was given responsibility and the freedom to own and deliver my own work supported my amazing colleagues.

In my first rotation I led a market review project for one of our contracts that was coming to term which was required by the regulator Ofgem, and I took the project from start to end, delivering it to Board level over the 6 months. My second rotation involved more market research specifically looking into business opportunities for National Gas to get involved in as well as some regulatory work involving consultation response writing. I was given the most responsibility in my third and final placement. To name a few, I was organising events, leading meetings with external partners, writing consultation responses alone and creating documents to be used business-wide involving SMEs from across the business.

I definitely felt I made meaningful contributions to both my teams and the wider business overall by being given the responsibility of handling important projects, meetings and documents.

The company has some fantastic benefits such as the pension scheme however one area that I did not like specific to my role was that we do not get overtime or TOIL, as I worked a lot of overtime in one of my rotations due to the nature of the role and was not compensated for it.

I feel the Graduate Scheme has prepared me very well for my future career. By rotating in three diverse teams, I've been given an insight into a variety of work and stakeholders and have developed basic skills such as creating PPTs or organising events that will be greatly applicable in any future role.

I believe it varies by team but my personal experience was that I received great support from all of my managers with whom I had regular contact including weekly 1:1s. I also had great support from the Early Careers team and felt I could reach out with any issues knowing they would help me resolve them.

I believe this also varies team-to-team as my final rotation was in London where my work-balance was slightly worse due to the long commute and the number of external events I was attending as well as the overtime I was doing due to the high-intensity nature of the team and role. However, more generally I had an excellent work-life balance as National Gas is extremely flexible with hours which allows you to cater your working hours to what best suits you. I was able to start and finish early allowing myself to beat the traffic home and still have time to go to the gym or play football for example.

Very inclusive, positive and welcoming with a number of internal events and activities designed to make new starters feel welcome and get everyone mingling with each other. The NEON events are designed for new starters to meet each other and form a bit of a community so they don't feel alone when joining a new business, for instance.

We have a lot of talks and sessions on DEI and I know there is a large focus on it throughout the business, especially at senior level.

Yes

Amazing company with good values, an extremely friendly and flexible work culture, doing meaningful work where you feel the work you are doing is having a real impact.

I expected to be able to choose my own rotations in my scheme and I was able to however I was not given the initial role that I applied for upon joining, though I was made aware that this would be the case when I received my job offer.