Sky was crowned with the Most Successful Early Careers Strategy at this year’s ISE Awards. Early Careers Senior Consultant, Charlotte Stephenson, explains how they did it.
Sky was applauded by ISE Award judges for aligning its early careers strategy with business goals, showing strong stakeholder engagement at multiple levels and compelling data that evidenced both immediate impact and impressive long-term retention success.
Aligning strategy to business goals
Sky’s multi-layered strategy contributes to the achievement of strategic business goals in the following ways:
- Ensure Sky has the talent it needs now and in the future
- Supercharge the business with the diverse talent it needs to flourish
- Enhance our employer brand by building brand warmth with our future customers
- Build a positive culture
We partner across Sky and meet specific business needs including:
- Rotational programmes to grow breadth and agility across Business, Data & Analytics and Technology
- Functional programmes to build technical expertise in Finance, Data Science, and Software Engineering
- Customer Service Group apprenticeships in saturated markets nationwide to enable growth
We ensure every stage of the early careers experience is not only informed by external insights, but also aligned to expertise from our centres of excellence, such as growing critical skills in growth areas, mirroring the organisation’s approach to key processes and tailoring for our talent and continually evolving our strategy to remain market-leading.
Collaboration is critical in shaping and delivering our strategy
We work closely with internal stakeholders across the business:
- Executive sponsors and senior leaders – input on the strategy and share insight when we innovate through new designs, ideation sessions and end of campaign reviews
- Business champions – representatives in each business area partner on the entire early careers experience
- Cohorts – we seek their feedback in bi-annual surveys and involve them in testing new designs
- Group D&I team – we partner to define our strategy and partnerships
Our external partners bring a wealth of expertise:
- Our GTI team attract, recruit and support candidates
- We partner with Wiser on brand, Cappfinity on assessment, The Smarty Train on development, and numerous training providers for our apprenticeship programmes
- We partner with Creative Access, SEO London, and Zero Gravity to diversify our pool of candidates
Objectives ladder up to our overarching strategy
By reaching our hiring targets and retaining talent post-programme, we ensure Sky has the talent it needs. Last year, we retained 94% graduates and 95% corporate apprentices.
We supercharge Sky with diverse talent, exceeding the Sky-wide hiring targets.
We also enhance our employer brand by sourcing a significant proportion of applications via direct channels and increasing brand awareness year-on-year.
The high engagement scores we achieve in our cohort and business champion engagement surveys help us measure our progress towards building a positive culture.
We consistently deliver strong results across the early careers journey
Our new brand immerses candidates in Sky through authentic stories and diverse imagery, driving applications and enabling us to close pipelines early.
We designed innovative assessments, personalised feedback reports and an interactive Preparation Hub and 94% candidates agree our assessments gave them a greater insight into Sky.
Our intern conversions exceed the industry average, and we see strong conversion rates from our positive action insight weeks in Business and Finance.
The learning and development journey spans the entire programme and is highly rated by cohorts. We run pre-skilling workshops, induction, midpoint, and graduation events.
Our unique team structure is central to our success
Our Product team is an agile team who focus on innovation and continuous improvement, and pivot in response to feedback or changing business priorities.
Our Delivery team is our team of marketing and content specialists, recruitment business partners and coordinators who are responsible for attracting, selecting and managing cohorts on programme.
The team have specialist areas of expertise and collaborate on key activity, all with the aim of working together to deliver the best early careers experience.
Find out about ISE Awards 2026, which open for entries on 5 January.