Welcome to the new IT Early Talent (ITET) Blog!

As many of you may know, we currently have two IT Early Talent schemes, the UK IT Student Program and US Interns program. The schemes are a way for us to bring in top talent into the organisation and we wanted to launch this new blog to give you all an insight into the amazing work the students and interns do!

This blog will be a place where you will be able to get an insight into the schemes and what they aim to do, as well giving the students and interns a place for to share knowledge and the work they have been doing. The management of the blog will be ran by the students themselves following a set schedule which will include many “mini-series”.

Today we will start off by introducing the UK IT Student Program to you!

After a crazy first few years finding our feet as an Elanco IT student program (previously the program was part of the wider Lilly initiative), we are finally ready to start sharing our activities and amazingly talented students with you all!

Hey I’m Ellie Burn! and I work in the Digital IT team as a capability owner of Digital Analytics and Tagging. I also run the IT Student Program for the students in the UK and have done since January of this year.

For me, leading the program has always been a huge ambition and passion of mine ever since I was an Elanco IT student myself in 2016/17, as part of the Lilly IT Student Program. My placement year at Elanco was really unlocked my passion for both business transformation through tech, as well as influencing and leadership. My year with Elanco also enabled me to have confidence in myself and abilities and encouraged me to continue the work on the key skills I would need to be successful in my desired career.

I recognise that I would not be in the position I am today without the investment and coaching from the program and those around me across my yearlong placement, and I am motivated by “giving back” and building up other students to launch their IT career too.

I am especially passionate about ensuring we create an environment which everyone can bring their true, authenticate self to work and a space where people can be creative and reach their full potential.

For me, Elanco IT is an extremely diverse, fast-paced and exciting place to work and I love to inspire others to take the opportunity to also be a part of it!

Since I took over the program in January, I have been working to ensure our current students (who joined in Aug 2020) are still getting a rich experience, as well as forming a new core program team and designing a new revamped program for the 2021 intake (joining in July).

So what is the program I hear you ask?

Well… the IT Student Program is currently a UK initiative ran by Elanco in line with the UK University degrees which include an industrial year/ placement. It aims to bring students from Computer Science and Information Technology related degrees into the company for 12-13 months, to gain industry experience in our IT organisation, but also allows us to bring in new ideas, energy and innovation.

Some Key Concepts:

1. The students join us in-between their 2nd and 3rd year at university and are usually around 20-21 years old.

2. The students join normally in the first week of July, and remain with us until the following July/ August.

3. The students return to university for a year after their placement with us to complete their studies. We aim to bring top talent back in a year’s time when they graduate.

4. We typically recruit two generic personas “Software Engineer” and “Technical Analyst” where we then place the students in a relevant team which makes sense for both their skill set, but also their interest.

5. The students are given a real role within a team and work on large scale projects with their own responsibilities and goals. We treat them as if they are FTE’s.

6. The purpose of the year is to help them put their studies into practice in industry, as well as develop them to be able to work in a corporate environment (as most have never had a office-based job before).

7. The students often come unsure of exactly what they want to do, so we aim to give them a variety of different projects in different areas. We aim to give them a 25% rotation in another team at the 6 months mark.

8. The students have a variety of experiences throughout the program and are given centralised L&D including a set “curriculum” alongside their role, which includes various sessions such as an Agile workshop and presentations 101. This is 10% of their time.

9. The students are given a supervisor (usually an aspiring manager) as well as a mentor for the course of the year.

10. We follow some key principles for the program, including championing diversity and inclusion.

Meet the ITSP 2021/22 team

As I mentioned earlier, I have been working to form a new “core” team to help me run the program! Without the below rock stars I definitely would not be able to lead a successful program!

Dan Willis – Digital BI, International Commercial IT

Dan is part of the core team for a second year in a row, and brings some fantastic experience and knowledge in L&D. Dan is responsible for designing the student curriculum this year. Dan was also a student himself in 2016/17.

Joe Sellers – Speke BI

Joe is joining the core team for the first year and we are very excited to have him! Joe is based in Speke, Liverpool at the Manufacturing site. Joe is going to be heavily focused on recruitment this year. Like myself and Dan, he was also an Elanco student in the past (2017/18).

Ali Boehler – Delivery lead, TechOps

Ali is the first member of the ITSP team to be based in the US! She is joining the team this year to help us ensure the program has a global focus! Ali has so much experience to bring to the table, especially around mentoring. She will be responsible for designing the mentoring scheme this year!

To ensure the students are also stretched and supported on the more technical side of things, we have recently seen the additional of a Technical Coach for the program.

Harry Fitzgerald – Web Dev lead, SolutionOps

Harry is also based in the UK, and was a student back in 2017/18 with Joe. The aim of appointing him as the ITSP tech coach is to ensure that we are including the correct technical training, as well as being able to provide the students with a technical expert to learn from/ get advice from for all of their technical projects!

I strongly believe that early talent is a vital part of any organisation, and I am so passionate to ensure we start to build a really strong early talent pipeline for Elanco IT. The ITSP for UK students is just one stream of early talent. I have been working closely with Doug and the US Interns program team recently, as we start to build one “pool” of top early talent through both of the schemes.

As we start to evolve the new ITSP in the UK, I will be sure to update you all through this blog! The core team and I will also be looking to run an overview session for a anyone interested, where you can come and learn more about the program in detail, as well as how you can get involved/ support the ITSP! ☺️

I hope you are all looking forward to the future blog posts to come! If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to me via email or Teams!