High-tech wants more bright young things

Computing giant EDS New Zealand, like other companies in the high-tech sector, is looking to universities for bright young things to groom as staff.

The company hopes to hire at least 40 graduates within 12 months for its new graduate recruitment programme. It already employs 2300 people.

Managing director Rick Ellis said five graduates had started in December in Auckland and Wellington and up to 10 would start next month. Another three quarterly intakes were planned this year, he said.

The programme is being piloted at its application maintenance, testing and development arm.

Ellis said the initiative began late last year in recognition of the need to recruit fresh talent into EDS and the IT industry, and provide them with training and mentoring.

"If the pilot proves a success in the solution centre, we will look at broadening it to other areas of the company."

Graduates start with a three-month trial and, if both parties are happy, become permanent EDS staff. For the next 21 months they are mentored and receive regular reviews.

Ellis said they worked with the Java and .Net development platforms and later were likely to work in other areas such as SAP, data warehousing and document solutions.

Competitors Unisys, IBM and HP are also hunting for graduates in a bid to find fresh brains as the economic outlook improves.

Each company has a programme which sees graduates exposed to a range of tasks and roles within the organisation.

Mobile phone company Vodafone has been recruiting graduates since the mid-1990s.

Spokeswoman Sarah Williams said Vodafone would take on about a dozen graduates this year, up from eight last year, for a programme that has been expanded from technology to include finance and marketing.

"This year, we've expanded again and are pretty much business-wide, and have grads in our marketing, finance, technology and customer operations areas.

"This is in direct response to a commitment from our executive team to invest more in building our internal talent pool and ensure our future success, and our aim is to increase the number of people we take on to be equivalent to around 1 per cent of our total employee numbers," said Williams.

The programme is popular, and draws between 750 and 1000 applications each year.

Williams said each recruit had a business coach and got to know other staff as part of a formal programme.