Degree Apprentice Review

My role involves raising invoices, running various financial reports, gathering member's contributions for the project's weekly newsletter, ordering different hardware and software for use by our project and clients, and reporting on the status of projects. I interact with our directors, project managers, testers, developers, clients, and suppliers. I feel I do not have the knowledge, experience, training, or support to carry out my role. I am on the career pathway to train to become a project manager, I have very little confidence I can achieve this in the next 5 years due to the lack of support.

I feel like my confidence in verbal communication has improved as a result of working remotely in a different location to the rest of my team. I have attended some training courses with external trainers which have been useful for my development. At university I am averaging a 1:1. The content we cover is incredibly theory based and it is difficult to see how this relates to the workplace context, despite having an entire module dedicated to this (work based studies). The standard of teaching is poor. The university is very disorganised, the expectations of assignments and the way they are marked is not clear, meaning it is very difficult to get a grade higher than 75% regardless of how much effort you put in. Feedback is often poor, when given a grade of around 70% I asked how I could improve, the response was that I got a good grade and there wasn't really anything I could have done to make it better or get a higher grade - this is not conducive to ongoing personal development.

There is very little I have enjoyed about my programme. It feels as though the company hired me as an apprentice and then left me to get on with it, with very little support, despite me reaching out for help. I have offered constructive feedback - which has been completely ignored.

I appreciate the sentiment behind the 2 day induction but it was death by powerpoint and more overwhelming and boring than useful, several people, myself included, gave feedback on this which has not been actioned. We attend university for 10 hours one day a week. It is incredibly difficult to maintain concentration for this amount of time, especially in the first year when lectures/seminars were back to back with no scheduled breaks. My feedback on this was disregarded entirely. We are assigned a workplace mentor. Mine has been incredibly understanding and supportive.

My confidence and mental health have been severely damaged as a direct result of my participation in this programme. I never have enough work to do despite asking for more. I am often given tasks I do not have the knowledge or skills to complete. Rather than taking the time to explain the task to me and support me while I develop the skills to complete it, the task is assigned to someone else. This is not how apprenticeships are supposed to work. It has left me feeling like I am in the way, useless, and a burden to my team.

The university has had massive issues with staffing throughout the duration of my programme. As a result we have had inexperienced staff and staff brought in from other universities who were not briefed on the modules they would be teaching us. The University has a lot of support for students but this is hard to access as we are only there one day a week and have few breaks in which to access that support. There has been nothing enjoyable about my university experience so far.

I feel as though much of what I learn at university is not very applicable to my role, especially as the technical students have business modules and the business students have technical modules. For example learning in great detail how to set up a network has not helped me in any way to be a better business administrator. Some of the soft skills we have focused on have been useful in my role.

The Sports and Social Club is excellent. It is great value for money and there are a variety of events on that appeal to all audiences. There are lots of opportunities to engage in CSR in the local community and the company is always engaging with initiatives such as diversity and inclusion, international women's day, health screenings, etc

No

This programme has given me the opportunity to obtain a degree without student debt and to gain 3 years of full time work experience which puts me in a very good position for my future career, making the programme highly commendable. However, I feel the quality of the degree and work experience I have received is not of a high standard, and it has left me with a lack of confidence in my own abilities and value. This programme has put me through so much stress and has severely impacted my mental health. With this in mind I cannot recommend it.

Really think about whether a degree apprenticeship is right for you based on how you learn, how you work, and what support you need. In your application it is good to focus on the CGI values and examples of how you have demonstrated them, as CGI like to employ people they feel fit with the organisational culture.