Finance Apprentice Review

I am a finance apprentice. My role mainly involves looking after all of the expenses for the company, both for corporate credit cards and personal expenses. It also involves many other jobs that are associated with the expenses, such as completing anti bribery information, mileage spreadsheets, monthly accruals and recharges. It involves interacting with many other employees and outside agencies such as the credit card provider.

Yes, I have learnt a lot of new skills as finance was a totally new profession for me. I will attend AAT finance courses throughout the apprenticeship and have already passed the Level 2 courses. Hopefully I will also pass my exams and gain the AAT Level 3 qualification in the future.

I enjoy working at TRL. The people are I work with every day in the finance team have been very friendly, helpful and welcoming. The work has been interesting and challenging to date, although I hope that now I have got the hang of the everyday work, I can continue to learn new skills and gain knowledge regarding the other areas of finance.

I do feel valued as part of the finance team and have received positive feedback from my line manager during my performance review and from the apprenticeship coordinator. I havn't received much feedback outside of those occasions.

The induction period was intense in the first few days with lots of new information regarding the company, policies and procedures. There did not seem to be much induction of a general nature or an overview in terms of the finance department. It was more about trying to teach me my job role and how to process the expenses. There doesn't seem to be much of a structure to my programme from a company point of view. There is support if I ask for it.

There is support available if needed and the training provider/tutors often mention that help is available. They can be contacted by email or phone. I havn't accessed this yet as I havn't really needed much help.

My line manager is generally supportive, particularly if I ask for help. Most of my training for the job was provided by another member of the team, who was very helpful and good at teaching me how to do the job. Other members of the team are always available and willing to answer questions. I have found it really hard to have to ask for help so much all the time. I havn't really had as much interaction with my line manager. I don't think I have a mentor.

I think the salary for my apprenticeship is very reasonable. The expenses and costs that the company covers, such as accommodation; for my training courses in Bristol, travel costs, food costs, exam fees, etc, are very good.

There aren't many company events that I know of, just the Christmas dinner, which is great. There is a social group for all of the apprentices at the company, but being much older than all of the other apprentices, it's not something that appeals to me to get involved in.

Yes

I think in general it is a good company to work for who try to look after their staff.

The application and interview process was easy. The training provider is located quite far away from TRL, and travelling to the courses is more difficult and time consuming than I expected from where I live. I would advise others to look into this carefully. I wasn't expecting the apprenticeship to contain the skills development work that we have to do. This could have been made clearer from the start. As an older apprentice, this part of the course feels really pointless.