Project support officer Review

I am a project support officer, in my role I get involved in programme governance, secretariat duties for our project board, planning, risk, stakeholder engagement and communications, project planning, scope & scheduling

I have learnt so much in the 3 months since I started - this is my first office job (I only left school last summer). I've been on internal training events (induction etc), plus a 1 day introduction to Agile Project Management. I've learnt a lot about how to communicate in a business setting, brushed up on my excel skills and started to get to grips with MS Project

My team are great - they recognise that I'm an apprentice and allow me to ask as many questions as I want without feeling stupid. There's a very relaxed atmosphere in the office, and we also have flexible working hours. So far everything has either met or exceeded my expectations.

I feel appreciated by my line manager, and also by my department which has a departmental lead for PD apprentices who checks in with us all regularly, and gets us together once every few weeks for a check-in.

So far, the programme seems really well organised. Our training provider (n:gaged) have given us a list of all of our training dates for the next 2 years, which means it's really easy to plan holidays etc around these. I've had 3 different inductions, one with my department, one where there were about 50% of the PD apprentices present (they did two at opposite ends of the country), and then a third with n:gaged which set out all about the programme for the next 2 years. The classroom sessions so far (3) have been really engaging, a good mix of activity and lecture and led by a really engaging trainer who is also a project manager who really understands his topic. I have had meetings with my personal coach

n:gaged are really good at answering queries. I tend to contact them by email most of the time, but know I can also just pick up the phone to them if I need to. PD apprentices are really lucky, as well as our tutor and assessor I also have a personal coach, who seems to really care about me as a person. They always want to know how I am, and mine has really helped me to make the adjustment from college to employment. I've also had a few personal problems and they've really helped me to understand what was going on and how I can balance that with my learning and my day job. What i've learnt over my first few months is that this is the first time Project Delivery has been run as a standalone scheme (we've all started from Oct 2016 onwards). Some Civil service departments have previously recruited Business Admin apprentices and placed them in Project roles, and that n:gaged weren't the training provider for these apprentices as they were trained by the Business Admin provider. I mention this because I was initially put off by some of the previous reviews of Project Management in the civil service and the training, but every experience I've had so far has been really positive.

I haven't been allocated a mentor in the workplace yet, but to be honest with everything else I have going on I haven't seen the need for one. As I said earlier, my manager has been great as has our departmental lead. The civil service give us half a day a week study leave in addition to any classroom learning days, where I can concentrate on e-learning / evidence gathering / reading etc

I'm based in central london and my salary is just over £25000 which for someone straight out of a-levels is amazing. I have to pay for my own travel costs to and from the office every day, but any costs for travel to work meetings / training courses etc is met by the Civil Service. As I still live at home, i have plenty of spare cash at the end of the month, and I'm currently trying to save as much of this as I can so that at some point in the future I can move out.

The civil service has something called a "corporate contribution" which forms part of my objectives. I have one corporate contribution objective set by Fast Track (which is to do with scheme promotion) and one set by my department which is in line with some of the work they do. There haven't been many company events in the 3 months since I've been here.

Yes

My experiences so far have been really positive, I like the fact that I'm delivering things that should benefit the public - and it's one of the reasons I wanted to work for the civil service in the first place.

The application process can seem really long (my experience of this was by no means unique last year. I applied Feb 2016 and finally started Feb 2017. The assessment day consisted of an interview, written work and group work, and wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it was going to be - I think i'd just built it up in my mind to be something it wasn't. Onboarding was soooo slow! Some of the documents I handed in at assessment centre were lost, so I have to get them re-certified. I'd have liked to have been told upfront just how long the process was going to be!