British American Tobacco - Career development

And as you’d expect from a leading global business, we offer highly competitive rewards for success, invest heavily in training and development and offer truly international career opportunities.

Our global talent strategy aims to create a legacy of leaders. We focus on driving high performance and the development of leadership capabilities to help our people realise their full potential. We do this by providing the right job experiences, opportunities to learn from others and through our global learning and development portfolio.

We place a lot of emphasis on creating a coaching culture, as we believe that training and development should take place as close as possible to the work being done. We also think that coaching is the right way to develop leaders at all levels, to share knowledge and to build better business solutions.

Global graduate initiatives

Our one-year Global Graduate Programme offers graduates a full-time role from day one and a chance to make an immediate impact on our business.

All with the aim of becoming a manager at the end of the first year, the programme offers world-class development and training to help build business awareness and aid functional development.

Among the training offerings is the BAT Global Graduate Academy: an intensive two-week training as part of our one-year Global Graduate programme. The programme focuses on developing the next generation of diverse leaders and accelerating the development of their commercial leadership skills. It offers graduates a full-time role from day one and gives them access to career and development advice from senior leaders and Management Board members.

Battle of Minds is our global competition focused on finding the brightest early-career business minds around the globe – helping to develop the next generation of diverse leaders. In 2022, the contest again focused on ESG, with more than 4,500 people entering and 750 brilliant ideas submitted. The winners were Team FlexSea from the UK, who won with their idea of proprietary technology that creates a seaweed-derived bioplastic that can be used as packaging.

Find out more about some of our early career initiatives at BAT.

Learning and development

Delivering world-class L&D opportunities for our employees has always been an integral part of our culture. L&D is becoming an increasingly important enabler to accelerate our transformation and we have a firm commitment to the development of leadership and functional ‘must win’ capabilities. All functional ‘must win’ capabilities have foundational learning programmes in place, creating a level playing field of knowledge and skills. In 2022, we launched a new programme for the most senior 120 executives in the Group called the GLM120 A Better Tomorrow™ Programme. The programme provided learning in:

• sustainable net turnover growth;
• ESG, science and regulation;
• impact and influence; and
• leading innovation.

Our flagship learning programme, Made@BAT provides advanced level skills development for all our marketing managers, equipping them with the best external, off-the-shelf learning content to be able to build brands in the digital era. Over 3,200 managers attended our core leadership programmes in 2022, including the Women in Leadership programme and the Global Graduate Academy. We continue to accelerate and broaden the capability development of all managers in the Group via our digital learning platform, The Grid. The platform provides leadership, digital and functional learning content for all 13,000 managers, anytime, anywhere, promoting a culture of self-development and continuous learning. In addition, our flagship talent development tool, 'Leadermeter', focuses on transformational leadership attributes and provides robust individual insights. It facilitates an active focus on an individual’s development and allows for talent actions to build the leadership pipeline.