Project Analyst Review

Since joining the bank, i have taken up the role of Project Analyst. Working with my line manager who is a project manager has given me a good introduction to this role and a perfect mentor who is able to guide me and assist with development of the skills that i'll need to succeed in the role. Day-to-day, I attend project meetings, looking to support the project manager and help to provide clarity to the project team through collating documents and sharing them with the team. This might involve things like walk-throughs of stage gate reviews and pulling reports from Planview.

I've learned a lot of new skills, primarily through gaining valuable experience and being exposed to meaningful work and working with colleagues at a more senior level to myself. I've became comfortable communicating and presenting to colleagues at whatever level they may be and have gained a solid understanding of the project process within the bank. I've also learned a lot about managing in terms of both myself and communication with colleagues, for example, I've developed my time-management skills well and i know how to effectively communicate with a team to help pull us towards a shared goal.

I enjoy the overall apprenticeship programme. There have been a lot of events set up and training opportunities which have helped to provide us with opportunities to learn and develop within our roles. One event which i and many others enjoyed was Challenge 2018, which was a very good opportunity to network with colleagues across the bank at similar career stages to ourselves, as well as to meet with some more senior colleagues and also some SMEs.

The programme seems to be well organised on RBS side, however, our provider hasn't been particularly well organised. There are signs that efforts are being made to improve things, however there haven't really been the results that everybody would have hoped for yet. The content provided has been good.

I receive as much support as i need from my employer. I have been told that my apprenticeship is my priority which seems fair as i fall under Early careers which is helpful as it allows me to know that whenever i have free time in the office i can commit it to progressing with my apprentice work. This allows me plenty of time to clear my apprentice work and then use the rest of my time to give developing skills in the project analyst role my full attention.

BPP do provide good support with working towards my qualifications. They provide good resources through the VLE for learning the content and they also provide good tutors for our classroom learning sessions which have been added to the programme fairly recently. For the modules where we don't have classroom learning sessions, it might be helpful to have a contact who we know we can go to to ask what is expected of us and what sort of answers they're looking for to assist us with swift completion.

Due to the nature of the projects that i work on, i feel like the modules that i'm learning are quite well suited to my role. Whilst my role isn't massively technical personally, the projects that i work on always have an element of technology behind them, be it application upgrades, server upgrades etc where i need to understand the basis of the technical changes being made and my apprenticeship work supports me with this.

I think there are yes, however it isn't something that i've ever made much of an attempt to get into as i do plenty outside of work as it is. I've heard that there's football played at gogarburn, there's been hackathons and coding events, as well as around christmas time hosting parties with free food and drinks.

Yes

I feel that the company is headed in the right direction and is a good place to be as an employee at the moment. There seems to be a good focus on developing our workforce and providing people with the opportunities that they need to develop and chances to gain further qualification. There's also plenty of job opportunities due to the scale of the organisation which helps you to decide on a bit of a potential career path.

If you put in a good level of effort with your apprenticeship work and put in the effort yourself to find extra opportunities which RBS puts on for colleagues in terms of extra learning and networking events, there is a lot to gain from working within this organisation. Staff are paid fairly for the work that they do