London Underground Engineering Apprenticeship Review

My role is to work with Train Maintainers, Advanced Train Maintainers or Train Doctors in order to get a eel of what my real life job after my apprenticeship will feel like. I work on depots carrying our real life tasks and in the office producing write ups which will be assessed as part of my end grade.

I have learnt a lot about how trains and rolling stock are built up, the type of maintenance that may need to be carried out and how this is done. It has shown me a lot about using hand tools and understanding the principles behind what I am actually trying to produce.

I am really enjoying the programme as I get to work with real people, performing real tasks that actually mean something to people. I am part of a small team who are helping millions of people each year to travel around one of the largest cities in the world. I love working directly with trains and cannot see myself doing anything else.

The organisation has been overall extremely poor with much of our course being planned last minute, unnecessary amounts of time being take to decide what we are to do next when we could be out in the business working and a lot of uncertainty as to if we will even get jobs at the end. A lot the organisation has been a shambles and it's only a change in manager that has seemed to salvage this slightly.

With regards to the work I am doing, there is a lot of support available to me and I feel I can ask any question I need to know the answer to and get an accurate answer back. However, some of it still comes down to the poor organisational skills of the managers which leaves us feeling uncertain and unsupported towards our progress.

I am able to ask any questions I have to any one of the team and they are always happy to supply me with the answer I require. There is a lot of support coming from them and I feel I can easily achieve my goal, even when I am unsure what I'm doing.

Without the training I have received, I would not be able to recognise what I need to on a train. This goes for equipment, terminologies and procedures as the knowledge of these all comes from time and practice, something that I would not have had much of without the apprenticeship.

There are activities that come up all of the time. These include travelling to schools and parents evenings in order to talk to younger people about my role. There are also positions available on the apprentice team, giving apprentices a voice to speak through and speak out about the issues they are facing.

Yes

I have made great progress to my learning and my online work in the past seven months and I have really enjoyed my time here. However, I would certainly tell them to be cautious about their decision due to the organisational standards I've faced as some were rather amateurish, and from what I've heard they don't seem willing to learn from their mistakes and better structure could probably be provided elsewhere.

You have to show an interest in the job. If you are committed to the task, even if you don't know much about engineering, and work well with your colleagues you will easily pick up fragments of knowledge which will one day make sense and you will learn something much greater from this.