The great return – welcoming back associates
Agility Spotlight
A long-standing scheme for holding onto talent is the Bosch Management Support (BMS) programme. Through BMS, teams can invite retirees and other associates who have left the company to continue working for Bosch on a part-time basis. This has helped many teams increase their agility by becoming more flexible, adapting to business needs and demands.
In 2018, Brigitte Malige, Manager of the BMS scheme, noticed a gap based on her long Bosch experience that could create opportunities so she set out on a journey to find a way to retain some of our younger talent at Bosch.
“Each year as a business, we spend a lot of time training and developing interns to help support divisions and departments on various projects and topics which benefits the company, which in turn allows the interns to gain much needed work experience. However, we lose that knowledge and skill set as our now experienced interns disappear back to universities around the country for their final year. Of course, each year, much of the knowledge and skills gets relearnt by our new interns and then passed on again.”
For Brigitte it was simple - why not try and retain knowledge and experience, and give some interns the possibility to still work whilst in their final academic year? And so, the New Skills Support (NSS) scheme was born.
We spoke to a range of associates using the NSS and BMS schemes to support their daily work to find out what benefits they see from utilising this flexible resource.
Matt Knight , Business Development Manager, Bosch UK, works in business development and has plenty of examples of how BMS and NSS have supported his work. “For BMS we brought in someone who had a lot of knowledge and experience in data privacy. That was an open work package for us, so it was a good fit bringing in someone who had some background into that role. The NSS scheme is great because of the access it grants to employees who have familiarity with digital tools and social media.”
Matt has more projects planned. “When you are working on agile projects, you need support at short notice, and perhaps only for a certain interval. You might have a peak in the project where you need extra capacity. NSS/BMS gives you that flexibility and diversity of skillsets.”
An Engineering Manager at Bosch UK, has similar views. They explained, “The people I have working in BMS support me with the huge amount of knowledge they’ve built up over many years, bring their expertise to my team, and help us with their respective specialisations - BMS tends to be all about the valuable experience that an associate has gained. On the flip side with the NSS scheme, I think the main benefit is the flexibility and the ability to get hold of people at short notice with experience of the business. One of the associates I worked with through NSS also worked for me as a student, so that was easy because I knew him, but I also had pretty good success stories recruiting NSS people from other areas of Bosch. One associate, for example, joined me through the NSS scheme on a very important Brexit topic and now we’ve offered him a full-time job.”
They don’t think that it’s only their team that can benefit either. “I think anybody could use the BMS and NSS schemes. The NSS is quite advantageous for us in an agile way. Agile tends to be sprint oriented and sometimes you need some capacity for a few months, so the ability to flex up and down on the capacity required is brought in by NSS.”
We also spoke to Adam Ariba , NSS Engineer, Bosch UK, for his take on his own experience working through the NSS scheme.
“The thought of returning to University after my internship was exciting, however I became accustomed to having a professional role where I was able to learn whilst making a difference and contributing to a team. The NSS scheme allowed me to continue with my studies whilst gaining crucial ‘real world’ experience. The scheme also taught me to manage my time efficiently between university studies and Bosch work. I believe the department benefitted as a result of the scheme allowing for surplus tasks to be carried out by ‘an extra pair of hands’, which allows for deadlines to be met without compromising the quality of the work. I would strongly recommend other departments to make use of the scheme when work builds up unexpectedly.”
Nick Fenton , Manufacturing Engineering Manager, Bosch UK, has had good experiences using NSS employees in more practical engineering roles too. “I had a very good year of interns going back 2-3 years ago. I was thinking to myself, I’ve got three talented people: they’re local, they’re good engineers, and they’re very motivated- wouldn’t it be great to somehow bring them into the business in the future? We signed all three of them up to the NSS scheme and they worked flexibly through their final year. What I think was a big win was, when Covid hit, they found themselves spending much less time at university and with much more availability to do NSS. I think we benefited from more engineering time with them, and they benefited from an income.”
“The success story is that now, all three individuals are either on an apprenticeship with my team or in full-time positions. If there was not something like the NSS scheme I would have said goodbye after the internship and maybe called them a year or two later to ask if they’d graduated when I had a job or an apprenticeship available. What I like about the NSS scheme is that it is a very flexible bridge between when Bosch can offer something and when employees are available.”
