Early on in my career, I encountered the rather curious culture in operations that surrounds “grads”. The term is not really used to refer to anyone who has been to University and has a degree (basically that would include 80% of all office based staff, whether managers or not and is likely true of a good proportion operational recruits and new Train Operators over the last decade given the proportion of the population that now go to University). Instead it specifically refers to those who have been through the Graduate Training Scheme. Yet in recent years this method of training has dwindled to a handful of engineers and other specialists. It is the apprentice schemes that now dominate this area of direct recruitment. The intake for these schemes will include some people with University degrees, but also includes those coming straight from school.
The whole topic is rather complex.
IME, “grads” fall into four groups:
(1) Those who are ruthlessly ambitious and will kiss arse in order to further their careers
(2) Those who quickly realise how dysfunctional the place is and settle for a middle ranking position, which they generally carry out to the best of their ability without causing issues
(3) Those who lack the self-awareness to fall into either of the above two groups, and will shove a broom handle up their backside if told to do so
(4) Those who quickly realise how dysfunctional the place is and decide to leave.
Group 2 above can actually make very good managers.
Groups 1 and 3 naturally don’t.
The real problem is more TFL’s dysfunctional and haphazard recruitment process, which seems to time and again fail to match ability / experience with posts. This seems to apply as much to non-graduates as graduates.
There’s also the “weakest link” problem. Those who remember this gameshow (is it still going?) will recall that the object of the exercise was to vote out the weakest member of the team at each round. However when it reached the penultimate round all of a sudden the strongest person found themselves highly likely to be voted out as they were now a threat. Recruitment works in the same way, except in TFL’s case this voting out of talent is endemic.