Welcome back to The Insight Series, where we catch up with leaders and practitioners in early careers to share real-world experiences, insights, and best practices around talent development, engagement, and growth.
We’re delighted to feature Alpa Sondhi, EMEA Talent Acquisition Excellence Director at dentsu.
Throughout her career, Alpa has led Early Careers strategies for leading organisations including financial services, professional services and multinational matrix environments. Her experience spans attraction, assessment, onboarding, development and retention, partnering with senior business leaders to build diverse talent pipelines aligned to workforce planning and future skills needs.
What’s the biggest early careers development challenge you’ve faced in the past 12 months?
For me, it is crucial that early career programmes can contribute to social mobility and future leaders’ pipelines development. It has been one of my main focuses in making sure that graduates have the best start to their careers.
Given cost pressures and evolving organisational priorities, the need to ensure equitable development opportunities is now more important than ever. What we know is that the factors of confidence, networks and exposure to corporate environments do not exist evenly and, without a conscious effort, they will continue to be disparate, especially on entering the organisation.
Therefore, the challenge has been to design an experience that would enable early careers talent to flourish from day one and throughout their graduate programme (and beyond), giving clear career pathways, manager support, developmental and mentoring opportunities, and the sense of belonging.
And our ultimate task is not just to attract diverse talent, but to make sure that everyone can succeed and develop.
How did you overcome it?
This has involved defining clear skills-based progression pathways, so graduates understand what strong performance looks like at each stage, rather than relying on informal signals.
Introducing a structured 12-month programme with defined learning touchpoints throughout the year to ensure continuous development, regular reflection, and timely interventions where needed.
In parallel, it has meant strengthening manager capability through a consistent coaching framework, with clear expectations around regular 1:1s, feedback cycles, and the active allocation of stretch assignments, ensuring opportunities are not dependent on visibility or self-advocacy.
I’ve also focused on embedding more intentional network-building through assigned sponsors, cohort-based senior leader sessions, and peer learning groups, alongside standardising onboarding so every hire receives a consistent baseline of exposure to leadership, business context, and real client or stakeholder work.
Attracting diverse talent is the first step. The true success is when people have the chance to thrive and talent, not background, drives outcomes.
What questions would you like to ask your peers in the Early Careers Development Network?
I’m particularly interested in how organisations are redesigning learning, rotations and career pathways to equip early careers talent with the capabilities that will be most valuable over the next three to five years.
Specifically, preparing early careers talent for the future where human skills will become increasingly important in addition to AI-powered automation.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, share in the comments!
Thanks Alpa!
We’ll be chatting with another Early Careers Development leader about trends, challenges, and innovative approaches soon.
