2024 Bid & Project Management Graduate

In fast changing markets, customers worldwide rely on Thales. Thales is a business where brilliant people from all over the world come together to share ideas and inspire each other. In aerospace, transportation, defence, security and space, our architects design innovative solutions that make our tomorrow's possible.

Together we offer fantastic opportunities for committed employees to learn and develop their career with us. At Thales UK, we research, develop, and supply technology and services that impact the lives of millions of people each day to make life better, and keep us safer. We innovate across five major industries; Aerospace, Defence, Ground Transportation, Security and Space. Your health and well-being matters to us and that’s why we offer you the flexibility to do what’s important to you; whether that’s part time hours, job sharing, home working, or the ability to flex your start and finish times. Where possible, we support a working pattern that suits your lifestyle and helps you reach your ambitions.

Bid and Project Management Graduate

We’re inventing the future, right here, right now, at Thales. By combining the curiosity to explore, the intelligence to question and the vision to create, we’re transforming the world around us.

The Bid and Project Management (BPM) stream within the Thales UK Graduate Development Programme (GDP) has been designed to provide a diverse and robust understanding of bid and project management capability within Thales UK. Thales UK manages a complex portfolio of 200+ significant projects and a similar number of key bids per year. Graduates will have the opportunity to work within a number of different UK based business units, including:

• Security
• Defence
• Aerospace

The BPM Graduate Development Programme is a 2 year rotational programme, comprising BPM skills and leadership training alongside three work placements. During this time you will gain experience within a number of different roles and businesses, developing a variety of bid and project management skills and competencies. Upon completion of the programme you will have a permanent role within the Bids and Project Management (BPM) function. The focus of this role will be either, Bid Management, Project Management or Project Planning & Control as the starting point of your BPM career.

The BPM GDP offers graduates the opportunity to study towards a formally recognised international certification in Project Management, and engage with the wider project management profession with the Association of Project Managers (APM).

Location

You will be expected to complete a number of placements across various Thales sites and businesses in the UK so flexibility on your location and the ability to relocate is required for this role. Our main sites are: Crawley, Glasgow, Bristol, Belfast, Reading, Cheadle and Templecombe.

Key responsibilities:

• Undertake bid and project management activities in support of the Bid and Project Management Team to ensure the successful delivery of the project
• Assist with the creation of bids and proposals
• Assist with the creation and maintenance of the project schedule; generate, maintain and monitor the progress of work packages; establish the schedule impact of work being complete/not complete against project milestones
• Support with updating budgetary information; updating resource information and validating the derived resource profiles
• Provide assistance for the provision of governance and support on project schedule generation, structuring and reporting
• Administer and maintain the project risk and opportunity register
• Provide support in performance measurement and variance reporting
• Provide assistance to the nominated Project Manager and their team for the extraction and coordination of data for reporting or analysis purposes

Skills, qualifications and experience:

You will be on track to or have achieved a bachelor’s degree in any subject.

To ensure the successful delivery of our bids and projects you would need to enjoy working to tight deadlines, so if you are highly organised, able to prioritise and work flexibly then a career in BPM could be for you! Collaboration is also extremely important, we are looking for people who demonstrate leadership capability but are also able to work as a team with a strong delivery focus. We work in a fast-changing environment so the ability to work proactively and adapt are also important.

Please note that Graduate Development Programme (GDP) activities take place during the working week but may require the investment of some personal time for travel and follow-up activities. You may have the opportunity to travel to Thales and non-Thales sites throughout the UK when participating in GDP activities.

Closing date: Our applications will close at 11.59pm on Sunday 7 January 2024, this is the only time we will be accepting applications this year. Please note, we will be in contact by the end of January 2023 with details of next steps.