Early Careers Lead

Opportunity

Are you an early careers professional ready to take the next step in a growing, forward‑thinking business? This is an exciting opportunity to build on your experience, shape impactful programmes, and take on a role where you can truly make a difference.

Joining a close‑knit and collaborative team of four, you will grow into an Early Careers Lead role, playing a pivotal part in developing, delivering and embedding programmes and supporting infrastructure that enables apprentices and graduates to build successful and rewarding career paths. This is a chance to contribute to a function that is evolving rapidly, with real scope to influence its future direction.

The role is central to the day‑to‑day operational delivery of our Early Careers and strategy, ensuring consistency, efficiency and high‑quality outcomes across both apprentice and graduate development pathways, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

You will contribute to the design, development, and management of these programmes (alongside our specialist Learning and Development colleagues) across the region, building strong, lasting relationships with educational institutions, training providers, industry partners, internal Subject Matter Experts, business and people leaders and the wider HR and L&OD teams.

Working in close partnership with external consultants, subject matter experts, and senior leaders, you will support co‑designing, co‑delivering and embedding this evolving programme across its full lifecycle.

Your role will span everything relating to supporting early careers professionals throughout their lifecycle – from onboarding to the completion of the Stantec programme and apprentice academic courses and qualifications. You will support the evolution of the development programme as it grows into a broader, more immersive experience, and you will create systems, infrastructure, resources and collateral, policies and processes, including pay and progression, to ensure the offering is sustainable and scalable.

You will also work in partnership with our Talent Acquisition team to support attraction, offers and pre‑onboarding, particularly for apprentices and mapping Training Providers.

You will support wider strategic initiatives such as targeted outreach, STEM, social value/mobility, ensuring we are attracting, nurturing and retaining the best talent and delivering a return on investment alongside our moral and ethical values and obligations.

You will play a key role in building and maintaining the infrastructure that underpins strategy and programme success, and lead on the delivery of communications, raising awareness and understanding to support a learning culture, learning in action and engagement, and teaching and empowering People Leaders.

You will act as a technical lead for Apprenticeships, supporting complex cases, compliance, risk and escalations and provide oversight and assurance on Apprenticeship delivery, consistency and governance.

In this role, you will be instrumental in shaping both the current success and future direction of our Early Careers function. Your work will ensure that our programmes run efficiently day to day, and evolve into a best‑in‑class offering that supports long‑term business growth.

By designing meaningful and engaging development experiences, you will help apprentices and graduates build the skills, confidence and networks they need to thrive. Simultaneously you will support People Leaders and stakeholders, enabling them to play an active role in developing emerging talent.

Through your focus on consistency, quality, governance and continuous improvement, you will help create a scalable and sustainable Early Careers framework that strengthens our ability to attract, develop and retain top talent across Stantec.

You are a passionate and experienced early career professional holding a CIPD qualification or equivalent, who enjoys balancing hands‑on programme delivery with the opportunity to shape and influence strategy. You are proactive, organised, confident working with a wide range of stakeholders, and bring both structure and creativity to your approach.