Consultant Review

I'm a digital apprentice working within the People Advisory Services (PAS) Innovation, Transformation Technology team. My role is to help design and build new tools that can be used by the business to reduce costs and/or hours or can be sold to clients. On a day to day basis, I will communicate with various team members to establish the day's priority tasks, from there I will set about scheduling any necessary meetings and creating a list of task for me to work through. I will then work through the day attending the necessary meetings and completing the priority work. At the end of the day, I send out emails with any blockers/questions I have to create a talk track for the next day's sprint meeting.

I have learnt a lot of new skills such as -Learning how to communicate effectively in an office environment -Learning how to plan a project -Learning how to gather relevant information -Learning lots to use new tools/hardware to present and build technology offerings -How to manage time wisely -Personal Leadership -Plenty of internal training course on topics such as Design Thinking -Attend external courses such as Alteryx Inspire Europe

The work can be stressful/complicated due to the demanding nature of the business. However, within EY there will always be people in your team who you can turn to for help, and the company culture rewards people who get work done to a high standard. The job is very similar to what I expected, and I do enjoy the work.

The EY apprenticeship is very well structured. The initial introduction and training gave us the basic foundation of skills such as Excel/writing business emails to allows us to hit the ground running. EY is very generous with studying, we receive 1 day off a week to study, this gives us plenty of time to study and work on assignments. The task delegation varies between the team, in my team your expected to flag any capacity you may have and from there the team will allocate more work.

Within EY you receive a lot of support. At EY everyone has a counsellor, this is someone who you can go to with any issues/concerns and they will try and help you sort it out. EY also has a live chat session with HR, where you can speak to a real person and express any concerns you may have. Overall, EY has a very good attitude towards supporting the staff member, and will always try to help you in any way possible.

QA has provided all users with a skills coach, this is someone who keeps you up to date with anything going on behind the scenes. There is 24-hour safeguarding at QA as well as an action desk who can help you with any queries. The university side can be a challenge, but I have noticed an improvement.

There is an overlap between what I learn at QA and what I do at EY. Modules such as Business Strategy, Network and Communications and Data Modelling and SQL all have provided me with information that I used in my role at EY. My counsellor also tried to get me involved in projects that will be relevant to the modules I'm studying that year.

Yes, so EY has a variety of sports teams such as Rugby, Football, Badminton and Netball which any level of staff can go and play. As apprentices, you may also get asked to attend recruitment events where you will represent EY and talk about the apprentice scheme to potential new apprentices.

Yes

It is a very friendly environment where you will get the opportunity to learn lots of new skills and gain experience working in the big 4. The work is interesting and everyone is very kind and will give you all the resources you need to be successful, and pass the university course as well as shine in EY.

Ensure you look at good business practices, email writing and how to act in an office. Also, ensure you arrive at every meeting dressed smartly and have all the necessary information that EY have asked for. Do some background research on EY/any research they recommend you complete before the interviews and assessment day.