Engineering Degree Apprenticeship Review

My role as a first year degree apprentice is to undertake as many valuable shadowing opportunities as possible, this is to help us in the business for when we start rotation work. Another main role of my job is to organise STEM events for school children to encourage them into thinking about a career in STEM. Another role of the apprenticeship is too engineer, create, design, build and test an educational game which will encourage children to think about engineering as a career. The aim of the game is too teach coding. This will exercise my skills to work in a team, whilst creating a project.

Since joining the apprenticeship my passion for aircraft has grown greatly, forcing me to further understand aircraft systems and the systems at GE. My teamwork skills have also developed after being placed in a new team of unfamiliar people. - My confidence has grown. I have further developed my presentation techniques since being on the apprenticeship.

I enjoy the program because I get to work with many different people around the business, even though I am not yet working on projects around the business. I enjoy the freedom and trust we have also, this makes the apprenticeship excellent and also more professional. The dynamic between colleagues at work is friendly and creates a nice scene in which to work.

Our program is very well structured in terms of college and university days. However the college/university aspect of the apprenticeship is not what I expected. I thought the university aspect would be taught at a higher standard, with a lot less minor, but still impacting problems. The structure of the apprenticeship in terms of work is very fluid, and this exercises our initiative by forcing us to create the structure ourselves which I think is beneficial to my development.

We get a lot of support from higher years in the apprenticeship, our employer also offers help to us during our monthly 'touchpoints'. I have personally been offered extra help with the mathematics aspect of the apprenticeship and this was to find people around the business to help me with the maths.

Though we are not at UWE site, we undertake our training at Gloucester College for the initial 3 years of the apprenticeship. Though the aim of this is to ensure we have more support, we tend to run into a lot of issues as there can be communication breakdowns between GC and UWE. But all in all, we are given support at the college and in work.

I have not yet been able to apply many skills learned at university as I am in the first year of the apprenticeship, this is because we are not allowed to work on any projects within work. I am told that during other years in the apprenticeship that the skills learned can be applied to the apprenticeship.

There is a football session on a thursday. There is the occasional apprentice social night out which is always good for networking. Another aspect of extra ciricular event is the STEM events: Girls Get Set, STEM works, Lego Mind storms, Go 4 Set and many more opportunities to work with school children and teachers.

Yes

Because it is a very prestigious apprenticeship and will develop the person in a very professional way. The apprenticeship allows you to work with lots of people in an environment where everyone is friendly and encouraging. The apprenticeship has developed me as a person and i would recommend to anyone interested in electronic and computer engineering.

I would advise to get work experience with the site you intend to work on. You should ask as many questions as possible and make sure that you get answers, this will help you make the right decision. In order to create the best decision for your life and development you should have as much knowledge as you can possibly can.