Software Engineering Apprentice Review

Site Reliability Engineer in the Platform Engineering team, working on scripting, writing lambdas and provisioning and maintaining infrastructure as code via IaC tools (primarily Terraform)

My technical knowledge was limited to begin with so I have learnt many skills! the whole tech stack (ADO pipelines, cloud infrastructure deployments, (terraform, kubernetes) as well as a lot of Python knowledge. Soft skills wise I feel confident working in a large corporate tech team and have developed good communication skills

Very much! I have also been given the opportunity to move teams for the next stage of my development, which is very exciting!

From my employer's side mostly good, though the nature of the work didn't always line up directly with the KSBs I had to hit so finding relevant tasks could be problematic. Our scrum team was very well organised, and I had good agency to be able to pick up any work/projects I wanted to.

Plenty! The team and my managers were more than helpful with any issues I had with onboarding, as well as technical problems/queries further down the line when I was working more independently on tickets.

Mostly good, though my coach wasn't hugely proactive with feedback when it got closer to my gateway time and so I was left a little unsure/anxious about whether I had hit all the KSBs. Everything worked out in the end though as I got a distinction, so maybe my coach knew this! The instructors were hugely helpful, and always made themselves available for queries about KSBs and how best to hit them/whether or not my work will have hit them, example answers for potential questions and how to best structure our portfolio of work.

The bootcamp provided was incredibly useful for someone new to tech roles in general and gave me a great baseline understanding. The courses provided were slightly less useful as time went on, but as mentioned earlier this was more down to my role being specifically in the cloud-engineering space and the work wasn't always hyper relevant to the modules we were taking at the time.

Yes lots, there are often whole-team lunches and dinners organised and informal pub trips after work with the team. As well as this, we have a vibrant Early Careers Committee which has a number of societies, from sports to coding clubs.

Yes

The work life balance is great, no one ever encourages you to work through lunch or in your evenings (they say if you have to work overtime for the task then it's a time management issue in the team and the system needs to be adjusted) and they pay very fairly for an apprenticeship compared to some of the other schemes I applied for at different companies (though having said that considering the level of work we do for companies is often very similar to the junior engineers in the teams I think all apprentices everywhere should get more compensation).

Be yourself in the interview, they're much more interested in your personality, work ethic and life experience during the interview than technical coding ability as they know they can teach the right candidates that on the job. And enjoy the process! It was by far my most enjoyable interview experience when I was applying to many.