I joined Steer’s Rail Advisory team straight out of university and was delighted to get stuck into meaningful project work straight away and action on what I had learnt.
From the first week, I was involved in appraisal for the Manchester Task Force, a cross-industry group aiming to improve the reliability of train services across the Northwest of England. I was trusted to perform complex analysis on industry-specific software and to present my findings to the Task Force Board just a few months into my time at Steer.
Steer’s graduate programme has provided useful training to develop my software skills and technical knowledge, but its real advantage over other companies’ schemes is how quickly my cohort and I were exposed to high-profile clients and encouraged to take on project leadership roles. From the first week, senior colleagues have encouraged me to speak up in meetings, to build my network, and to deliver meaningful results for our clients.
I’ve now been at Steer for two years. I am managing a number of projects, including crowding forecasting for c2c, improvements to freight timetabling for RSSB, and financial modelling for GBRTT, requiring a range of technical skills and people skills that I simply just did not have when I started.
Steer works in a huge range of markets, and the Grad Scheme’s flexibility means that I’ve been able to focus my work on markets and projects that really interest me rather than simply completing arbitrary tasks that are assigned to me. After simply expressing interest in the work to the Project Manager, I was invited to build the spreadsheet model underpinning Steer’s widely-publicised long-term rail demand growth scenarios for the RIA, the results of which made front-page news.