Apprentice signalling Technician Review

Carrying out routine maintenance and responding to, diagnosing and fixing faults on the signalling systems and equipment.

Learnt lots of new skils since starting this apprenticeship. Electrical and mechanical systems and circuits, railway specific equipment.

It has mainly been interesting as most of it is new to me. Working in the depot is good out on the ground with the teams. The first year living on the navy base was aweful being almost on lock down treated like a child.

I thin head office and higher managers appreciate the program and are keen to encourage apprentices but down on the ground its very different. Apprentices are not well liked and can encounter some hostility from collegues and supervisors as they can be seen to be stealing jobs from older, longer serving staff. This can make life quite difficult.

As it has gone on (I'm half way through now) it has become less and less arganised. courses are not being provided on time due to instructors leaving. As these instructors left due to retirement it was not that they left at short notice. They should have been well prepared for this but they have not. This has put all of this years apprentices well behind in their development..

The training provider (babcock International) was only for the first year and although a couple of the tutors were excellent in the main they seemed to have no interest in teaching network rail apprentices and were quite unhelpful. Now (years 2 and 3) All our training is provided by Network Rail. As yet I have only been back for 1 course due to the lack of instructors so am yet to see how it will be.

I have found my mentor and Team Leader to be really helpful as well as my colleagues. Particularly the ones that came through the apprenticeship themselves. I have also found colleagues on other departments extremely helpful when I have undertaken placements to write assignments. I think A lot of this is more about the actually people you are working with and how you bond with them in the first place as I know this is not the case with everyone. On a day to day basis I don't have much contact with any management or anyone else and haven't as yet need assistance with anything so unsure of how it woud be. I ave had trouble trying to book on a particular course I needed and recieved a complete lack of assistance from anyone in this case.

The first year is very low and I found it hard to live on although some of the younger apprentices managed ok. The second year when we go to our depot to work it goes up apparently to reflect the fact we will have to support ourselves. This was at about the level of minimum wage, hower now that has risen to the 'national living wage' our second year pay is less that this and has not risen to reflect it.

On the base in the first year there was a lot of sports clubs but not much else. You were not encouraged to go off base at all (to the point of having a curfew at night) No encouragement to get involved in the community more to keep oourselves to ourselves and stay on base and do sport) If you don't like sport there was nothing much to do in the evening expect play pool on 2 tables for 200 people or watch 1 of the few communal TV's and extremely limited internet. Years 2 and 3 you are living back at home so you can please yourself. Nothing much arranged through work expect on a personal level with your collegues. Luckily my depot have been very welcoming and we have been out socially many times.

No

It would depend on the friend. I would reccommend it for younger apprentices but not for mature apprentices. I believe the whole scheme has changed drastically for this year and they no longer use the navy base so I really can't say.

To put it diplomatically Network Rail have a very inclusive diversity policy so project youur differences. I wish they had been more honest about how we were going to be treated like children regardless of age of experience. Would have been nice to have some pre warning of how apprentices are really looked upon in the depots and spoken to some people who were not on the scheme instead of filling apprentices heads with how wonderful they are. It does not prepare them well for liife on the ground.