D.Phil. (Personal and Professional Leadership) / For most graduates, entry into the working world is the start of everything they have aimed for through school and university. (Holden & Hamblett, 2007). They arrive with an intense desire to prove themselves, along with often unrealistic expectations of what the organisation will deliver. The organisation, driven by deadlines, profits, and promises to shareholders, has its own aims, and all this is situated “in a time of vast changes – changes so epochal that they may dwarf those experiences in earlier eras… changes that call for new educational forms and processes.” (Gardner, 2006, p.11). Add to this South Africa’s specific issues around quality of education, historical inequalities, and culturally disparate workforces, and you have multiple reasons for why both business and graduates could “fail to achieve their real goals” (Schein, 1964, p. 68). In order to better support graduates, it is necessary to more deeply understand the nature of the graduate transition from university to the world of work. As identity is critical to the process of adapting to new professional roles, I focused on the graduate identity journey in the first year of work (Ibarra, 1999). Using constructivist grounded theory, I tracked a group of 20 graduates over a one-year period, in a graduate development programme in a financial insitiution in Johannesburg, South Africa. Comparing the data I collected to Holmes’s (2001) Claim-affirmation Model of Emergent Identity, I provide insight into the identity issues that graduates need to overcome during this first year, how these issues impact their self-esteem, personal agency, and self-efficacy, and which coping methods they choose to employ during this time. The results suggest that by providing graduates with a liminal temporary identity, the graduate identity, they are better able to manage the transition from student identity to professional identity. The temporary graduate identity allows them to play with their identity rather than work at their identity while on the graduate programme (Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2011). In order to create the temporary graduate identity it is suggested that graduate development programmes need to be reconceptualised as rites of passage, filled with ritualised activities that enable graduates to experience communitas with other graduates on the programme (Turner, 2008). Various graduate rituals are suggested to this end. Within the graduate rite of passage, graduates need to be supported in developing their interpersonal, intrapersonal and technical skills. To help graduates develop deeper insight into self and others, a graduate self development model is proposed. In order to support the development of technical skills, rotational technical skills programmes and fixed role programmes are explored. A framework is suggested for how to develop rotational programmes that maximise the pros and minimise the cons of rotational programmes. In order for the graduate programme managers to best support graduates during their time on the programme I recommend that they need to become more sensitive to the needs of the graduates, I adapt the graduate self development model and offer this as a tool for programme managers self development. This model will help graduate programme managers to begin to uncover some of their own stereotypes and unconcious biases, and more deeply develop their coaching, mentoring and supporting skills. Many of the graduate issues that arise while on the graduate programme involve graduates and managers leaping to conclusions based on faulty assumptions about each other. This often results in an impasse between graduates and their managers. I suggest that graduate programme managers take on the added role of mediator in order to point out to graduates, and their managers, how they might be misconstruing each other, therefore helping to avert some of the issues graduates experience. The findings of this study therefore have implications for graduate programme managers, and provides insight into how to better design and develop future graduate programmes.