Level 3 manufacturing Review

Currently I am finishing my final year in maintenance. I have moved onto a 12 hour shift pattern and my daily role on shift at the moment involves shadowing the other maintenance technicians and also completing certain small jobs on my own. I have been learning both basic electrical and mechanical skills.

Recently I have been learning lots of new skills and also developing some old skills I have learnt. I have tried to use the limited skill set I have learnt from my rotation of all the segment areas in the factory and apply it to some of the jobs I come across in maintenance.

Currently I am enjoying my programme, I feel like I am learning skills that are transferrable and can become useful in my future. Before coming into maintenance when I was rotating around the factory I wasn't enjoying the apprenticeship, I was doing work that I found boring, I didn't think the jobs I were completing were useful or educating for my general development.

My programme isn't very structured or organised, ever since I've started in the factory I've been left to sort things out on my own. Although we were given a rotation plan non of the segment areas know we are supposed to be in there and have nothing specifically planned for when we get in there and then we are used as cheap labour.

Currently in maintenance I am receiving a lot of support from the shift maintenance technicians. They're helping me to learn both electrical and mechanical skills. I also have a mentor who I see periodically who tries to help me with my NVQ work and just any general issues I have.

At the moment, we have monthly meetings with our training provider for our NVQ but sometimes I am unable to attend due to my shifts. we can email out trainer asking questions about our NVQ but its hard to ask about any knowledge questions because he has never taught our course and doesn't know a lot about it.

The qualification I am completing doesn't help me at all during my current role. The qualification is more focused towards repairing and also casting composites rather than the more specialist roles we have been pushed into. When in our rotation, the qualification helped sometimes but I felt like I just learnt everything on the actual job.

There is a few things that you can do outside of work for example the fitness classes that are available for all four shifts at a boxing gym. There is a few other sporting events that are available such as a football one but nothing that interests me so much or im available to do.

No

Throughout my apprenticeship I just feel that its been so unorganized and I feel like i've had to find work and do things myself. For our work in the factory there has never been a plan or structure to follow when in our segment areas. The skills we have been learning haven't been too helpful considering our final working areas.

If others were applying to Siemens id make sure that the job role is definitely something you'd like to do and do some research on it. I feel like the apprenticeship role I applied for was nothing compared to how they had described it at first and I am disappointed with how the apprenticeship has planned out.