Assistant Relationship Manager Review

I am taking an apprenticeship as an Assistant Relationship Manager (ARM) with NatWest. What my role entails includes meeting with business customers, predominantly small business owners, and helping them reach their goals and potential with backing from the bank by offering various financial services and products.

I have very much developed my customer service skills as working with clients in this way is very different to the client facing roles I have had in other jobs such as retail.

I really enjoy it. I think that not only is it great to work towards a qualification and earn money while doing it, as opposed to university, but I am also doing something that I enjoy. I get a lot of satisfaction out of helping customers as you get to know them on a personal level and learn a lot about what they are hoping to achieve and what you can do to help them reach those goals. I have only been here for a few months but some co-workers say the most rewarding part is when they take on a company as a customer and watch them grow and grow year by year.

I feel very valued as an Apprentice here. I have had various calls and meetings with important individuals within the bank to see how I a finding the course, or to give me feedback which I feel is really motivating within such a large firm.

I feel that my program is fairly well structured but it could be a little better. For example, one thing I do not understand is that they have webinars at the start of each module of the course, but expect you to have read 50-60 pages of the text book before hand, before you have even finished the previous module. However you can watch a recording of the webinar so I personally tend to watch the recordings once I have read the text book.

I am in frequent email contact and have scheduled meetings with my training provider tutor to see how I am doing and as a chance for me to ask any questions I might have. The support is really great in all aspects.

I work alongside my line manager so there is always the opportunity to ask anything I need and they always offer me as much time as I need to revise for the exams within work hours.

My salary is very nice, around £19k per annum with an additional 25% put towards various benefits such as private health care or pension funds.

There are various communities within the bank that you can sign up with. I have not done so myself, but an opportunity I have been given is to spend a few days with various different parts of the bank in order to gain a greater understanding on how the bank works as a whole and how all aspects of it work together in different ways.

Yes

As a whole the company is very supportive of my needs, the pay and benefits are very nice especially for an apprenticeship, and the work is fun and rewarding.

One issue I did face was that I did not know until the first day I started that I would actually be working in NatWest as it is owned by RBS. This is not a problem at all but I thought it would have been mentioned at some point. It might be worth double checking this if you do succeed. When I was in my interview there was a scenario role-play, where you play the role of somebody in a customer service role. I messed up on one part of it which I noticed while the 2 interviewers were outside of the room discussing how it went between themselves. I mentioned what I did wrong before they could bring it up and that was something that my interviewer/line manager said was really important and the liked the fact that I noticed my own mistakes and mentioned them before I was asked.