Early Careers Lead in Reading

Are you an early careers professional ready to take the next step in a growing, forward‑thinking business? This is an exciting opportunity to build on your experience, shape impactful programmes, and take on a role where you can truly make a difference.

Joining a close‑knit and collaborative team of four, you will grow into an Early Careers Lead role, playing a pivotal part in developing, delivering and embedding programmes and supporting infrastructure that enables apprentices and graduates to build successful and rewarding career paths. This is a chance to contribute to a function that is evolving rapidly, with real scope to influence its future direction.

The role is central to the day‑to‑day operational delivery of our Early Careers and strategy, ensuring consistency, efficiency and high‑quality outcomes across both apprentice and graduate development pathways, and ensuring regulatory compliance. You will contribute to the design, development, and management of these programmes (alongside our specialist Learning and Development colleagues) across the region, building strong, lasting relationships with educational institutions, training providers, industry partners, internal Subject Matter Experts, business and people leaders and the wider HR and L&OD teams.

Working in close partnership with external consultants, subject matter experts, and senior leaders, you will support co‑designing, co‑delivering and embedding this evolving programme across its full lifecycle. Your role will span everything relating to supporting early careers professionals throughout their lifecycle – from onboarding to the completion of the Stantec programme and apprentice academic courses and qualifications. You will support the evolution of the development programme as it grows into a broader, more immersive experience, and you will create systems, infrastructure, resources and collateral, policies and processes, including pay and progression, to ensure the offering is sustainable and scalable.

You will also work in partnership with our Talent Acquisition team to support attraction, offers and pre‑onboarding, particularly for apprentices and mapping Training Providers. You will support wider strategic initiatives such as targeted outreach, STEM, social value/mobility, ensuring we are attracting, nurturing and retaining the best talent and delivering a return on investment alongside our moral and ethical values and obligations.

You will play a key role in building and maintaining the infrastructure that underpins strategy and programme success, and lead on the delivery of communications, raising awareness and understanding to support a learning culture, learning in action and engagement, and teaching and empowering People Leaders. You will act as a technical lead for Apprenticeships, supporting complex cases, compliance, risk and escalations and provide oversight and assurance on Apprenticeship delivery, consistency and governance.

In this role, you will be instrumental in shaping both the current success and future direction of our Early Careers function. Your work will ensure that our programmes run efficiently day to day, and evolve into a best‑in‑class offering that supports long‑term business growth. By designing meaningful and engaging development experiences, you will help apprentices and graduates build the skills, confidence and networks they need to thrive. Simultaneously you will support People Leaders and stakeholders, enabling them to play an active role in developing emerging talent. Through your focus on consistency, quality, governance and continuous improvement, you will help create a scalable and sustainable Early Careers framework that strengthens our ability to attract, develop and retain top talent across Stantec.

You are a passionate and experienced early career professional holding a CIPD qualification or equivalent, who enjoys balancing hands‑on programme delivery with the opportunity to shape and influence strategy. You are proactive, organised, confident working with a wide range of stakeholders, and bring both structure and creativity to your approach.

You will bring:

• Experience working in a role focused on early careers and with Further Education providers, training organisations, Subject Matter Experts, and business and people leaders.
• Proven experience supporting apprentices, including from a pastoral care perspective.
• Strong knowledge of apprenticeship frameworks, funding structures, and levy requirements, including cross‑national borders.
• Experience providing advice and guidance to business leaders and people leaders.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management and organisational skills.
• Experience of managing budgets.
• A structured, strategic and commercial approach, with an ability to influence future direction.
• A collaborative and hardworking approach to support the team with the high volume of work and a rapidly expanding early careers headcount.
• Strong at building and maintaining relationships and working in strategic partnership with other teams and departments to provide a holistic approach to early careers (L&OD, HR, Talent Acquisition, Payroll, Social Value, Technical Leads, Business Leads, Subject Matter Experts).

We put people first: We're proud of our friendly, inclusive and collaborative environment where everyone feels valued and driven to succeed. We are driven to achieve: Named in the top 50 companies to work by Glassdoor 2025. Recognised by Corporate Knights as one of the world's top 10 most sustainable companies 2025. We do what is right: Industry‑leading training and development, paid professional subscriptions, and a professional progression plan to support you becoming chartered. We are better together: A supportive and collaborative team environment and wider ERG network. Growth: We're on an exciting growth journey across the UK – we want you to be part of it!

Great Benefits: Competitive salary, bonus schemes, enhanced pension plan, annual leave with the option to buy/sell additional days, private medical insurance, group income protection & life assurance, discounted gym membership and more. Hybrid / Flexible working: Enjoy a healthy work‑life balance with our hybrid approach to flexible working.

Stantec provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants for future and current employment and prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. We prohibit discrimination in decisions concerning recruitment, hiring, referral, promotion, compensation, fringe benefits, job training, termination or any other condition of employment. Stantec is in compliance with laws and regulations and ensures equitable opportunities in all aspects of employment.