Business Consultant Review

My role varies depending on the project that I am working on. As a business consultant, I work in a variety of different 'roles' including project management, service design, business analysis, communication and culture. My current role is working on growing an offering called Garage. This involves marketing and communications, sales, working with projects to adapt their culture and ways of working.

I have developed existing skills and learnt new skills. Skills that I have developed are presenting, particularly developed in terms of seniority of audiences and numbers of attendees. I have developed my team-building skills - I now work on setting up teams and creating a great team culture that enables the team to thrive, as opposed to just working well within a team. New skills I have learnt are Design Thinking - innovation and ideation and Agile - working in scrum teams, iterative and incremental changes to continually improve work. I have also learnt new skills in strategic thinking - building a story around work and why you have done something in a particular way or why you would communicate in that for example.

I love my programme of work. My work experience at IBM has been extremely varied - i work on different projects and schemes of work so i have a really vast scope of experience as opposed to specific. My degree fits in really well with work in terms of logistics - I attend university in 4 day blocks which are really well spread out so have very little impact on my day to day job. But also in terms of content, it is really well suited to my role as a business consultant. For example, I am currently studying sales and marketing which I have been able to apply to comms roles and now in sales and marketing that I am doing to grow the Garage offering.

The degree programme I am studying is really well organised because I have set times that I attend university and webinars in between times. However, in terms of the work experience, this is not structured because i move between projects quite sporadically. However, i find the experience that i gain by working on a variety of projects is helping to meet the knowledge, skills and behaviours prescribed by the university degree.

I receive a lot of support from IBM. I have a foundation manager whom i meet with on a regular basis to check in progress in my apprenticeship. They also deal with my career progression in terms of readiness to enter the business (promoting out of foundation). Being a part of foundation (IBM's early professional network) provides a network of people from apprentices, interns, graduates and foundation managers for support, and communities for learning and support such as Project Management Bitesize and 'How To'. In addition to this, I also have a mentor who supports me in my career progression and goal setting to achieve this. They also support in my degree and mapping my experience to my knowledge, skills and behaviours.

Manchester met provides a tutor whom I meet with once per quarter to discuss progress in my degree and meeting the knowledge, skills and behaviours as well as ensuring I am receiving the appropriate time off the job for my programme. We also have a host of materials and services available to us to support such as study skills tutors to support with reviewing assignments etc to ensure that we are on the right track.

My chartered manager degree is ultimately going to provide me with a lot of career opportunities because it will equip me with the knowledge for managing and leading people and projects which is the next step in my career and will provide me with the confidence to step into the management roles to put theory into practice. Shorter term, the modules that i study are related to my role and for example, sales and marketing has applied directly into my role of growing the Garage offering. Plus, all assignments are related to my job.

Yes, there are lots of extra-curricular activities for apprentices to be involved in at IBM. There are professional networking events such as Young Management Consultants network whom run events that we can attend. IBM also has an apprentice community who run work-related and social activities. As well, there are communities who run learning activities.

Yes

I would recommend both working for IBM and studying at manchester met to a friend. I would recommend IBM for their career opportunities but also because they really care about employees and there are many benefits, including social activities and schemes such as pensions which demonstrate this. I would recommend the degree course i am doing at manchester met because it doesn't impact on your day to day job as much as other learning can (i.e. 1 day weekly would be disruptive to me) and they offer so many services to apprentices to really support them.

For applying to IBM, the advice i would give is that they are looking for core competencies as opposed to experience. Skills that are transferable and a keen, genuine desire to learn and give the time to do so. For applying to manchester met to do a degree, I would recommend weighing up whether you have the time and drive to commit because it does require using some of your own time because you are working full time.