Understanding the New GCSE 9-1 Grading System – A Guide for Employers
This week thousands of students have collected their GCSE results, however many employers are still confused by the new numerical grading system. Research that was commissioned by Ofqual in 2018 found that more than one in five employers wrongly believed that 1 was the top grade. The A* to G grading system has been replaced…
What an Intern can do for your business
At Step, we are often asked by businesses where we feel students and graduates can add value and help them. There is sometimes a misapprehension that they will require constant supervision, and will not contribute significantly in return. However, many of our students and graduates have completed valuable and substantial projects through 8-12 week internships;…
Management Buyout at Step – the Student and Graduate Internship People
In November 2017 I became the owner of Step, after working here for the last five years of my twenty year recruitment career. It was a very proud moment for me, in the past five years I’ve developed a passion for the work we do at Step. Helping smaller businesses connect with talented students and…
Tackling the problems head-on – Internship Case Study
Anastasia is an Anthropology student at Durham University. Over the summer she completed a Market Research Internship with a leading provider of technical training and consultancy services to a range of industries. Anastasia was tasked with completing a research project which aimed to provide more insight into how various target-audience companies were approaching training. This…
Employers, be kind to graduates…
In a recent poll on our website, we asked visitors when they first received careers advice and were shocked to find that over half of respondents received no careers advice during their secondary education. As a business, we work closely with our local secondary Free School to host year 10 work experience and volunteer to…
Step and Social Mobility
Set up in the late 1980s by Shell, the original Step programme existed to provide paid summer placements for STEM students in smaller businesses. Originally supported by government and granted both business funding and skills-based funding, a network of partners (including universities and business links) administered the programme. Students applied to be a part of…
What constitutes a graduate role?
‘Graduates won’t want to come and work for us, and we don’t have the time to train them’ These are a couple of common misconceptions that we come across regularly here at Step, mainly when speaking with some of the smaller sized businesses who have yet to buy into the many benefits that hiring a…
The death of the cover letter, and other such recruitment clichés…
I read a blog recently written by a graduate recruitment specialist which I found so unhelpful that I feel the need to counter it. In this article, recruiters of entry level talent were told that the cover letter is dead and that it is time to start getting smarter about recruitment. We were told that…