Welcome to the second installation of 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’ve been catching up with Sam McVeigh, Early Careers Development Specialist at Northrop Grumman UK Limited.
Sam has over six years’ experience in Talent & Performance, specialising in Early Careers across the Financial Services and Defence sectors. Having started his own career as a Graduate, Sam brings both personal insight and a strategic lens to the design and delivery of Early Careers programmes. He is passionate about building initiatives that not only develop emerging talent but also deliver measurable value for the business by aligning capability development with long-term organisational needs.
Sam takes a data-informed, outcome-driven approach focusing on progression, retention and the creation of high-performance talent pipelines and is particularly motivated by evidence of impact, ensuring programmes are structured to enable individuals to thrive while directly contributing to business performance and future workforce strategy.
What’s the biggest early careers development challenge you’ve faced in the past 12 months?
One of the most significant Early Careers development challenges I’ve faced over the past 12 months has been bridging the gap between the expectations early talent bring into the organisation and the reality of how development plays out in practice, particularly within a project-driven, commercially focused environment.
Graduates join with a clear ambition to progress quickly, make an impact early and experience highly personalised development. At the same time, many organisations such as ourselves are structured around longer-term capability building, where development is shaped by business priorities, line manager capability and the demands of delivery where time directly impacts cost.
How did you overcome it?
The challenge was not about choosing between these perspectives, but designing a development approach that aligns both.
This meant maintaining the ambition and energy graduates bring, while helping them build the resilience, patience and commercial awareness needed to succeed in a complex delivery environment.
A key focus was working closely with line managers to better integrate development into live project work, ensuring graduates were adding real value while building capability. Alongside this, we introduced clearer structures around progression and expectations, enabling both graduates and managers to understand how short-term development investment translates into long-term capability for the business.
Crucially, this required shifting the perception of Early Careers development from a competing priority to an enabler of performance.
What this reinforced for me is that Early Careers development is not defined solely by the programme itself, but by the environment that surrounds it, particularly the extent to which the business is equipped and motivated to support it.
What questions would you like to ask your peers in the Early Careers Development Network?
How are you embedding Early Careers development into business-as-usual activity in a way that is seen as commercially valuable, rather than as time away from delivery?
We’d love to hear your thoughts, share in the comments!
Thanks Sam!
Next edition, we’ll be chatting with another Early Careers Development leader about trends, challenges, and innovative approaches.
