Leonardo

For some roles Leonardo adds a one-day assessment centre with group exercises and numerical, verbal and reasoning aptitude tests. A candidate who reaches the assessment-centre stage is committing an online test, a recorded video round and a full day in person to a single application - a real block of time to plan against a season in which several employers run comparable stages at once.

Leonardo runs two divisional graduate development programmes and a nationwide apprenticeship scheme (Leonardo graduate opportunities):

• Electronics graduate programme - based at Leonardo's Edinburgh site, focused on radar technology, with engineering and business-function tracks
• Helicopters graduate programme - based at Yeovil, Somerset, spanning engineering, business studies, manufacturing, operations management, procurement and finance
• Apprenticeships - 2 to 4 years, across hardware engineering, software engineering, business and cyber security, at UK sites including Basildon, Bristol, Edinburgh, Elstree, Lincoln, Luton, Newcastle, Southampton and Yeovil (Leonardo apprenticeships)

The two graduate tracks sit in different divisions in different cities, so choosing between them is effectively choosing a business unit and a location at the point of application, not just a job title; the apprenticeship tracks, spread across nine sites, carry the same location-first decision.

Instead, eligibility requires candidates to qualify for UK Security Clearance, normally to Security Check (SC) level, which the firm states "typically requires a minimum of five years' permanent residency in the UK" (Leonardo graduate opportunities). The same requirement appears on Leonardo's apprenticeship and graduate application pages and is independently confirmed by graduate-recruitment site Graduate Links. In practice, this residency requirement - rather than a stated sponsorship decision - is the real gate: it rules out most candidates who have lived in the UK for under five years, which includes the majority of international students partway through a UK degree, regardless of visa category.

In 2025, Leonardo was the only UK aerospace and defence company named to LinkedIn's UK Top Companies list; separately, it climbed Glassdoor's UK Best Places to Work ranking from 47th in 2025 to 31st in 2026, its second consecutive year on that list (UK Defence Journal). For a candidate narrowing a defence-sector shortlist, these are third-party, employee- or platform-driven rankings that let Leonardo be compared against other large UK employers, rather than judged on its own published claims.