Date Posted: Tuesday, 21 September 2021 

Posted By: Peter Manousos

“DuluxGroup’s graduate program is amazing. It is enabling me to broaden my horizons, collaborate with diverse people, develop my leadership skills and advance my career.”

So says Emily Jeffrey, who joined DuluxGroup’s graduate program in October last year.  Emily is an IT Project Coordinator with DuluxGroup’s DGTech Workplace Technology team.  She coordinates projects with end users in mind. These users are drawn from DuluxGroup’s many different businesses and brands, such as Dulux, Cabot’s, Selleys, Yates, Parchem, B&D Group, Lincoln Sentry, just to name a few, that DGTech services.

Emily says the graduate program is interesting and thought-provoking. One of the biggest challenges for her graduate group so far has been to develop recommendations to boost employee engagement with health and wellbeing initiatives, specifically amongst corporate and office-based employees.

The graduate cohort was split into teams to compete against each other. Emily’s multi-disciplinary group included a scientist, a sales executive, and a financial accountant. Working on a broad business issue, outside their areas of expertise, meant they had to use creativity and ingenuity to come up with possible solutions, all within the span of one day.

The team that won proposed the creation of a health and wellbeing app. The entire graduate group then got behind that winning idea to research and develop it and present it to DuluxGroup’ senior leaders. Emily led the project as Project Lead, and is now part of the health and wellbeing committee looking into the potential of developing the app for use across DuluxGroup.

“It was great to make connections across different business units and be around those awesome people,” says Emily. “DuluxGroup has a wonderful corporate culture and we are given a lot of good feedback.”

Emily graduated from ACU, with a Bachelor of Commerce and Business Administration double degree, majoring in marketing, at the end of 2017. After graduating, she worked in IT service delivery analyst and IT project coordinator roles, before looking to further her career.

She was drawn to DuluxGroup because of the diverse business units within the group and the opportunities for career development and growth. Emily was delighted to be accepted into DuluxGroup’s three-year graduate program.

“DuluxGroup’s graduate program is a great opportunity to kick things off and expand one’s horizons,” says Emily. “I don’t know of any other corporate workplace that offers that kind of opportunity.”