Leather shop apprentice Review

Leather shop apprentice - daily duties include: sewing, covering, line-balancing, quality checking, providing imporvement ideas, production capability, lean production. Essentially these are the main topics covered daily within my apprenticeship. My main role withi all of these is sewing, as i am a leather sewing apprentice so my entire apprenticeship is structured with sewing in the forefront.

Practical hands on skills such as sewing, covering, upholstery are all new skills to me that have been developed throughout the apprenticeship both at work and college. Existing skills in business management have been touched on but not had the opportunity to use these enough. Overall i feel that the main/only skills i have developed that are new are those mentioned above.

During my apprenticeship my manager changed his opinion on what he expected from us as apprentices which made it very difficlut to aim for any particular role when we finished. Being told to aim for an associate job when being far overly qualified. And not being able to aim for a role that i thrived at, was when i started to really not enjoy the programme. As well as this i really feel that there was a lack of stucture throughout the entire apprenticeship.

During my apprenticeship the management changed in my department. This really affected the sturcture, with both my old and current manager having widely contrasting opinions and outlooks on the programme. As well as this the company demand changed, needing more people in production sewing i was taken out of the original programme which had been agreed to support production for the last 7 months of my apprenticeship.

Majority of the programme the support from the employer was good. With issues with my college programme giving us our written work/ exam work 20 months later than we should have recieved this. Our employer did chase this and push for us to get the work we needed, even so this was still 20 months too late.

As stated in the previous question, we received our written work / exam 20 months overdue, this gave us 3 months to complete 2 years worth of work (and are still expected to provide this in time and to pass). Aside from this major part, the college work contributes a large section of programme.

There is a real lack of college to work relation. What we do day to day at work cannot be duplicated into a college course as it is so unique. However i haven't used a single skill i have learnt through my college programme at my work place, this has been an ongoing issue since this apprentceship started.

None that i am aware of. There may be some of these extra-curricular activites, but they are not easily found if they are avilable. I was given the opportunity to have free German lessons which was an added bonus towards the end of my apprenticeship, however this would have been more useful being offered at the start of the programme.

No

Strating at my work place you are sold a real luxury apprenticeship programme. This is not what you receive at all. After talking to past apprentices who have the same opinion as well as current apprentices plant wide, this is a common answer and a real shame as the programme rally could be something great.

Do extensive research on roles and programmes avilable, and don't settle for any programme to just get 'a foot in the door'. Practise the online tests - maths, english and basic mechanical practises, as there are a lot of tests on these areas to even get a interview so prepare for this wisely.