Finance Apprentice Review

Finance Apprentice - worked a lot on Gross Margin and Budgeting and market investments. Would run reports for the brand building teams as well as being the main admin for the online budgeting system. Also did some team assistant work when needed.

I now have excellent excel and SAP skill. Learnt finance skills however as this was a finance apprenticeship it would have been nice to have more learning opportunities on finance to better prepare me for a full time role.

My time at Unilever was very enjoyable and my team were great and provided me with challenging and exciting work. The only downside was that the coursework side of the apprenticeship was very poorly organised and caused a lot of trouble.

I felt very valued at Unilever, my team gave me work which contributed to the business and I felt like I made a difference. My two line mangers both gave me great feedback and I was even nominated for an award for being recognised as a valuable employee.

I feel this is where Unilever lets itself down, for such a big company there are many areas areas for improvement. Once you join the apprenticeship there is no structured work plan organised for you so you have to rely on your manager to actually have enough work for you. This was a struggle for me to begin with as I wasn't being given much work and it wasn't challenging me. There is little contact with the apprenticeship co-ordinator once you have joined and you are left alone a bit and have to chase people up when you have problems.

Our training provider was awful. Wen we first joined we were told we would be having a training day which would complete a large chunk of our coursework after chasing up about this for 6 months we were finally told that it would not be happening. As well as this is took them a year to organise a re-take for our IT exam. After the original exam was done with a company which was shutting down even though they knew this. It was meant to take 5 working days to mark our coursework but on average it took between 2-3 weeks. The assessor we were given went from managing about 20 apprentices at Unilever to now over 60 and she struggles to find the time to give good feedback and support. A booklet with a lot of helpful information was not sent out to us for 3 months after PDS received it because they said they were going to re-write it however they never did and finally sent it to us after we asked to have it in its original form to save time.

My Line managers were very supportive of my apprenticeship coursework, they made sure that I had enough time to do it as well as if I was on track or not. The problems I had with PDS however were never resolved even after several meetings on the matter, I was never given feedback on whether PDS had been spoken to or a decision had been made on what to do, if anything.

I lived at home during my apprenticeship and travel costs were minimal due to me living so close. This meant that my salary met all my costs and i had a lot left over after each month.

Unilever provides a volunteering day once a year where you can go to many different places and do a days volunteering, they organise travel and lunch for you. They also give each employee 1 day to take off for volunteering a year and if you wish to take more time off they match any holiday you take for volunteering. e.g take two days holiday to volunteer they will give you 4 days off for volunteering.

Yes

Unilever provides great opportunities and although there are some flaws the pros out way the cons. Working at Unilever gives you great experience and sets you up nicely for your future career.

This is a great opportunity, the application process involves and online exam, a telephone interview and an assessment day.