A group of 24 participants on Dawn Meats Graduate Trainee Scheme have this week successfully completed a specially designed and delivered management programme at UCD. The program, which is an industry first, was custom designed and delivered by Agri-Food Advanced Professional Development (Agri-Food APD) a collaboration between UCD, UCC and Teagasc, which has nearly a decade of experience in delivering postgraduate training to the agri-food sector.
This programme builds on Dawn Meat’s strong record of investing in graduate management training. Dawn Meats has run in-house young manager training courses for over 15 years, and has also worked closely with the Irish Management Institute to deliver best-in-class training for its next generation of managers.
Speaking on behalf of Agri-Food APD Professor Dolores O’Riordan said: “We were delighted with the opportunity to work in close collaboration with Dawn Meats, to design and deliver a bespoke programme to further develop the skill set of graduates. The participants were selected from a range of business areas within the company and their positive feedback on the programme was very encouraging. We look forward to working with Dawn Meats in the future to deliver graduate programmes designed to develop the future leaders of the business”.
Dawn Meat’s Group HR Manager (Ire) Larry Keena coordinated the training along with Julie Dowsett Manager of the Agri-Food APD programme at UCD.
The 20 day face-to-face training was held over 10 months and covered elements of supply chain management, traceability, sustainability and food safety. Graduates were developed in areas of leadership, management, communication, innovation and lean business principles. The hope is that this is the beginning of collaborative training between academia and the food industry to up skill and develop graduates in this rapidly changing sector.
Dawn Meat’s Group HR Manager (Ire) Larry Keena commented: “We place a lot of emphasis on hiring high quality graduates and ensuring they get the best of training when they come to Dawn Meats. Dawn has a long tradition of providing management training to its young managers, and this programme is an excellent collaboration between academia and industry to ensure attendees get a strong grounding in relevant leadership and management skills. It has already proven to be very popular with the participants and the skills they have learned are already becoming evident.”
To find out more about Dawn’s graduate trainee visit http://www.dawnmeats.com/index.php/careers-at-dawn
