Apprentice Civil Engineer Review

The job role consists of a variety of different tasks working on various sites across the country, on different sites with different teams. While a lot of the work is done in the site office there are also opportunities to go out on site for setting out, surveying and service detection tasks as they are required. There is also a large amount of paperwork that must be completed to ensure that all work is done in as safe a way as possible.

I have learnt a variety of skills in my time at JNB, such as personal work organisation and management, delegation of tasks to other lads on site to ensure the jobs run smoothly and interpersonal skills. As well as this there are a lot of other skills that I have developed in a technical sense, such as using the accounting system, learning to undertake surveys correctly, and learning to locate services.

I believe that the programmes and the sites are very beneficial to the learning environment and allow people to pick things up far quicker than in a theoretical sense, and the site teams that I have been placed with have been more than happy to teach me what I need to know whenever I ask. This is very beneficial, however the input from the JNB Development team into my progression and has been kept to a minimum. This can get quite frustrating and demotivating as there does not seem to be any rewards for the effort that I put into my role, or any recognition of this at all.

Due to this being the first year of JNB taking a larger intake of apprentices in, there were certainly some teething issues to begin with. These were eventually ironed out and in some regard were to be expected, and in the end I did manage to complete all coursework in the correct amount of time.

The on site support is outstanding, however there are many things which leave a lot to be desired. For example at JNB you are meant to be assigned a mentor, and my mentor has been the same over two jobs, however between these two jobs, for a period of 4-6 months, I was put on a job with no other engineer for me to learn from. This meant that my progression was not as fast as I was unable to ask engineering questions to the site manager. This was never corrected or even questioned by the development team and for the most part for this apprenticeship I have felt slightly abandoned by them, having only had two chats with anyone from the development team since the course started in 2017

In the beginning, the tutor was fairly poor and thus the actual work that I was producing struggled, however when we had a new tutor put into place the support improved greatly, this led the group as a whole to go from falling behind to meeting the required end date

In my opinion, the qualification on the whole was not as useful to my job role as I believed it would be. While there were definitely some units which have come into use (Surveying etc.) there are also some regarding domestic pipelines which I have never needed in my time here.

There are no extra curricular activities that I get involved in on site due to being site based, I am aware however that there are skype meetings which are held to provide a "Lunch and Learn" atmosphere. There are also activities such as yoga which are held in the Blackburn Office

Yes

The recruitment scheme means that there is a financial benefits to doing so, leading to both myself and the party joining receiving some perks to them joining. Also at a site level the job can definitely be enjoyable at times. Also there are many people my age who look to go to university as they think there is no other option and JNB does provide an alternative

My advice would be to be flexible and versatile and try and soak in as much information as possible. Also try and be mentored by someone with a lot of experience not just with JNBentley but within the construction industry as a whole. Also if you are within the correct circles the job seems to open up far more.