The civil service has revamped its ‘Graduate Fast Stream’ recruitment programme and plans to relaunch it next week by offering candidates a live question and answer session with a government minister on Facebook.
The Q&A session will take place with cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood on Thursday 20 September and is intended to provide potential applicants with the chance to ask advice from the Prime Minister’s most senior policy adviser on taking up a management career within Whitehall.
After that, candidates will also be able to chat with existing ‘Fast Streamers’ to obtain help, support and insights into the civil service’s recruitment process.
Heywood said: “The Fast Stream continues to be an incredibly valuable source of new talent and provides the civil service with the means to recruit its leaders of the future.”
But the scheme has also just been reworked in a bid to provide new recruits with a more structured career path.
Rather than work in only one or two governments departments, they will now spend their first two years undertaking four placements in various roles across a number of different departments and sectors in order to gain a broader range of experience.
Participants will be required to get involved in front-line service delivery, which includes managing a court or Jobcentre, as well as managing people, projects and finance and developing and implementing government policies.
In their second two years, however, they will take part in two 12-month postings in order to deepen their experience still further.
Throughout the process, the progress of the new recruits will be monitored and facilitated by talent managers who are based in the civil service resourcing unit, which was introduced last year to handle HR across Whitehall.
Gillian Smith, the unit’s director, said: “This is a milestone in the history of the Fast Stream. The new learning and development package and improved talent management arrangements have clear benefits for the civil service and for Fast Streamers themselves.”
