Team working and business competitiveness awareness are valuable skills for engineering graduates. This paper describes one way to nurture them while motivating individual student excellence in a normal engineering course. In six years, four groups of students were nurtured through real engineering business situations in a model similar to industry's engineering pupillage. They were organised in business teams and guided to competitively solve progressively complex problems. Overall change in graduate excellence in the subjects was targeted and monitored as proportions of those who elected to do optional exit modules in the clusters. Quantitative and qualitative results showed that students who experienced the approach on a continuous basis responded much better than those who had breaks.