Wednesday 21 Oct 2009
GRADUATE NUMBERS DOUBLE AT NETWORK RAIL (SWINDON)
- Region & Route:
- Wales & Western: Western
- | Wales & Western
More than 220 graduates have joined the Network Rail team this autumn – twice as many as last year – as the company hires the talent needed to deliver a bigger and better railway.
Among these young guns, eight will be joining the Swindon office to help grow and operate a safe and reliable railway across the western route.
Nearly 80 people have joined the company in project management roles after completing a new MSc, tailored specifically for Network Rail, and run in partnership with University College London (UCL) and the University of Warwick.
A further 132 joined through the regular graduate recruitment programme and 20 more after being sponsored to gain a foundation degree in railway engineering at Sheffield Hallam University, bringing the total intake to 226. An additional 40 have also joined on an eight-week programme as part of the government’s graduate talent pool scheme.
Adrian Thomas, Network Rail’s head of resourcing said: “We have an ambitious programme to deliver a bigger and better railway for Britain and we need the talent to achieve this. By working with world class institutions such as University College London, the University of Warwick and Sheffield Hallam University, as well as using more traditional recruitment processes, we have hired terrific talent who will play their part in delivering multi million pound projects to revamp stations, build new track and improve Britain’s railways for everyone.
“It’s an exciting time to work at Network Rail and these graduates have a tremendous opportunity to be part of something that impacts on millions of people every day.”
Those joining the company will work across a number of disciplines including civil, electrical and mechanical engineering, commercial property, finance, operations and customer services, infrastructure investment, project management, strategic sourcing and information management. Positions have been filled across Britain.
Notes to editors
Visit: www.networkrailgraduates.co.uk
About the MSc in Project Management
Network Rail will fund all tuition fees and student accommodation costs for the duration of the course supplemented by an annual bursary of £5,000. Students will be given a range of Network Rail projects topics on which to base their dissertations.
On graduation students could expect to be appointed as assistant project managers on a salary package of up to £28,000 in their first year with excellent ongoing career prospects in the UK’s largest project management company.
About WMG at the University of Warwick
WMG, an academic department of the University of Warwick, is a provider of innovative solutions to industry, supporting some of the most advanced research, development and training projects in the world. The department currently operates the Stepping Stones leadership development programme for Network Rail in conjunction with Warwick Business School. WMG’s website: http://www.wmg.warwick.ac.uk/
About UCL
Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. In the government’s most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 59 UCL departments achieved top ratings of 5* and 5, indicating research quality of international excellence.
UCL is in the top ten world universities in the 2007 THES-QS World University Rankings, and the fourth-ranked UK university in the 2007 league table of the top 500 world universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. UCL alumni include Marie Stopes, Jonathan Dimbleby, Lord Woolf, Alexander Graham Bell, and members of the band Coldplay. UCL’s website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/
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About Network Rail
We own, operate and develop Britain's railway infrastructure; that's 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK's largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country's train operating companies.
Usually, there are almost five million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain's railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation's railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced - a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.
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