Application Support Review

My team are application support for one of the largest systems in the bank. My team deal with 'incidents' that are raised through the help desk. We deal with third level technical support for the application. My day to day work is investigating and trying to find solutions to fix the issues that have been raised.

I have Learnt basic SQL and UNIX commands along with basic mainframe knowledge. I do not feel I have had sufficient training in order to do my job to the best of my ability. I have been constantly told I will be put on external training In order to do this but this has yet to happen. There is no proper out of office learning/training provided for apprentices to learn or develop new skills.

I do not enjoy the program, I find the apprenticeship work is irrelevant to the job I do, it does not help me with my current role. We have to complete the work during work time for the first part of the program there was no external training/learning that has now been fixed and there are now a handful of training courses being provided. The program has been very unprofessional and poorly organised, It has been poorly run from the start until present, we were told the course was getting extended because the course work was taking longer to mark due to the lack of assessors to mark our work, there is 1 assessor to 33 students. The programme has somewhat improved slightly down to the amount of negative feedback the apprentices have constantly had to provide. But we are now four months into our second year and we still have not had our work from last year marked yet. We were told this would be back to us and we would have our certificates by March 8th this was then increased to the end of March both deadlines were missed and now we've been told we won't receive these until May. Our assessor has been off on sick leave for 4 months during this time BPP did not have anyone in place to mark our work. We have now got the assessor from the previous intake currently marking out work as well as the previous intakes work.

As my comments above the course/programme is very poorly ran and organised. The communication between RBS and BPP is very bad, neither know what will happen after our apprenticeship has finished. There has never been a clear indication of what we can expect to happen after the programme finishes. I have a high suspicion that during our first year our course work was being written on a month by month basis as BPP we not happy to release all of the course work at one time. BPP constantly miss deadlines that they have set themselves they are suppose to have our course work back to us in 10 days after we have submitted them, as it stands I have only ever had two pieces of work back within this time frame. The BPP virtual learning environment (VLE) has many spelling errors and incorrect information on it. The learning materials we have been given are sometimes youtube videos that are 8+ years old, this is a technology course, technology changes on a monthly basis so I find old videos do not help us learn anything worthwhile.

We have to get 'mapping sheets' signed by our managers once we complete a course to confirm the work is our own. I do not see why we have to do this, our managers are not teachers/assessors they are not able to say whether the work we do is correct or not, even this is a small task that requires a digital signature (used to have to be a wet signature until the apprentices complained) this can be challenging to get this signed off as our managers see this as an unimportant task. Each apprentice has different work loads there is no set time set by RBS on how long we should be spending on this work, my manager says this should be 1 day a week as that is how the apprentices in the past spent on the work, this was when they with QA which provided external training courses where the apprentices could do their work. As each apprentice has different work loads some can spend nearly a full week on apprenticeship course work compared to others than have a day. I see myself as 'cheap labour' as in regard to my employer as I have as big a workload as full members of my team.

I only hear from BPP about course work that has been marked. Other than that I don't hear from them on a regular basis, they are unable to provide updates on how the course is progressing, we are able to speak to them on during a 121 every couple of months.

I wouldn't say it helps at all, nothing that we have covered so far has been useful in my day to day role. I don't even know if the qualification will be useful after having rolled of the program. I'm unable to say whether employers will think it's a worthwhile qualification.

There are many out of work groups and networks we can join, there is one specifically one for new employees to RBS to join. There is a gym on campus that has a lot of facilities for team sports as well. There is also Facebook at work which has many different social events listed on that as well.

No

I would not recommend RBS to a friend or anyone for that matter, I feel the way the apprenticeship has been run from the point of views from BPP and RBS does not fill me with great hope that a full time job working here would be any different that what I have already experienced. [This section of the comment has been removed by a member of the RateMyApprenticeship Team because it did not meet our site terms and conditions]

I would suggest they look elsewhere for another role, I would only apply here if you were getting compensated well for the work you will be doing. After being here for 1.5 years I would say there is a lack in ownership from the management teams. RBS put a real emphasis on 'new ways of working' which works well for some teams but from what I've experienced. There is a severe lack of understanding from some management on how this should be implemented. In turn this puts a real strain on a team dynamic when you try and suggest another way of doing things when you clearly know their original plan will not work in your team.