Early Careers Development Lead

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 4, 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 in building 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.

Please note we have a separate Talent Acquisition team this role is focussed on Talent Development and Engagement through the lifecycle of the programmes.

This role is central to the day-to-day operational delivery of our Early Careers and strategy ensuring function, 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 LOD teams.

Creating a best‑in‑class early careers development programme and wider offering is a strategic investment priority for the Company in recognition of the importance of this expanding headcount. The Company is committed to nurturing apprentice and graduate talent who will become Stantec’s Consultants of the future. The team is therefore currently focused on rolling out an evolved development offering, as well as redesigning the existing development offering for current cohorts into a more tailored, Stantec‑led experience—introducing new and refreshed content, enhanced tools, and a greater emphasis on in‑person and experiential learning.

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

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

You will support with the accountability for the governance, budgeting and delivery of EC programmes ensuring they are delivered on time, to agreed standards and at scale, through strong project management and effective delegation.

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. This includes educating 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 not only run efficiently day to day but…