Paradoxes of fast-track career management

''Fast-track graduates'' are high potential university graduates who, On entry to employment, are specifically recruited on to accelerated development programmes, with a view to their reaching senior management positions in less time than the norm for non-fast-track graduates or non-graduate managerial populations. Historically, organizations have recruited fast-track graduates in large numbers in order both to meet short-term succession planning goals, and longer term (senior) managerial needs (Herriot, 1992; Knights and Raffo, 1990). While only a minority of graduates may achieve senior management positions, career management practice has demonstrated that it is from this pool that the top management cadre commonly emerges. The traditional graduate employment deal has tended to focus on the opportunity for continual, onward and upward career progression. That is, graduate career paths have been clearly demarcated, and the message has been that graduates have been employed in order to fill the senior management positions of the future. They have thus been given privileged access to the requisite training and experiences necessary to fulfil this expectation. However, the ''new deal'' (if we accept that it exists) is fundamentally different, since organizational restructuring has resulted in the stripping away of managerial levels, and at the same time in the blurring of traditional routes to the top. Therefore, the new (graduate) deal no longer assumes vertical progression, and there is much less of a guarantee that graduates will indeed be managed through the levels in order to arrive at senior positions at some obscure point in the future. Given this pervasive philosophy, fast-track graduates have traditionally entered employment with high expectations, particularly regarding their rate of career progression (Arnold and MacKenzie-Davey, 1992; Herriot, 1984; Mabey, 1986). Such expectations have commonly been reinforced by company ''promises'' to provide future opportunities which embrace traditional, bureaucratic notions of onward and upward progression (Williams, 1984). However, given widespread organizational restructuring; and changes in the nature of organizational careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of the assumptions underpinning this philosophy are being brought into question. Thus, in the light of the new organizational reality (Herriot, 1992), many organizations are articulating a new deal for graduates.