When you sign up to the graduate scheme they make you sign a training contract. This contract stipulates that if they find you a placement when they deem your training to have finished, you have to remain employed with Capita for a minimum of 2 years of which you need to be '100% geographically flexible and if you try to leave early they will charge you £21000 to cover their hyper-inflated “training costs”.
The training is almost non-existent. The “trainer” is as close to completely incompetent as any person has ever been before. The “training” consists of coming in at 9am and reading through online material until lunch. There is not a traditional classroom based learning as I and many after me thought it would be. After lunch, we are put into project groups and have to complete an in house project which management would have come up with. These can be beneficial to some, however as they are small projects with some 10-12 people working on them there just isn’t enough work to go around and have very little relevance to the outside world. In these sessions, many with nothing to do had the option of staying and working on individual work or to go home. Capita try and get you to complete an exam as soon as possible as this means you will find it more difficult to leave Capita when you inevitably try to leave before the 2 years are up.
In my particular stream, I was not given a role which I would not have considered appropriate the entire time I was with Capita and because of this I feared for my job prospects when I left because I did not have any relevant work experience. I would say 75% of my colleagues all feel the same when they come to leave Novus because they simply care about placing Novus anywhere so they can make money. They do not care about your personal development. This is a graduate scheme with the sole intent of making Capita as much revenue as possible.
One of my placements lasted a year in a role which was not remotely relevant and I was deeply unhappy. I emailed and phoned management week after week with my concerns but they do not return calls. They do not return emails. They leave you to rot in whatever location you’ve been placed in. May that be Barrow-In-Furness or Glasgow. Throughout the scheme, they will tell you they have proper placements coming up and in London but they never come to fruition and you wont hear from them again for months.
The sales team which are employed to find you placements are barbaric in their practices and will do whatever they can to place you anywhere in whatever role just so they can get commission. They will say they are friendly and “on your side” but they do not care about you.
If you take a place on the Novus Grad scheme, you may be lucky. You may get a decent placement in a decent location and get some great experience. But the vast majority of you will be deeply unhappy and deeply misled for 2 years, locked into a contract with a £21,000 penalty held over your head. People leave without paying the £21,000 so it could be considered to be scaremongering and is not a legal practice.
This isnt unique to me - this has been reviewed by other Novus and they say it is 110% accurate.
Take this graduate scheme as a last resort after you’ve exhausted all other employment opportunities.
Please listen to my warning - Capita Novus has been designed to exploit graduates and they will treat you as such.
