Apprentice Review

On a day to day basis I will attend meetings with the rest of my team, during this meeting tasks will be assigned to various members of the team, we will then spend the rest of the day ensuring these tasks are completed.

Yes, I have gained experience with shell scripting, Ansible which is an orchestration engine and all three MAG cloud service providers.

I enjoy the people I work alongside but do not enjoy the culture at accenture and think it's extremely biased in how work is assigned and apprentices are not given equal oppurtunities to work on new and exciting technologies. Work is given based on popularity rather than merit and it doesn't matter how well suited you are for a role or how much experience you have with the technologies being used in that role.

The program is organised or structured sufficiently, we have 20% of our time to complete our degree work, this is enough but some learners may find they also require using some of their own time. QA requires us to travel to their locations to attend workshops for our learning, there is usually two two-day workshops per degree module. Unfortunately there is no choice in which location you must visit for these workshops despite our office being very close to QA's Birmingham location sometimes we must still travel to Manchester and/or London for these workshops.

We are given enough time to complete our studies and individuals within the company are more than willing to try and help out as much as possible with any questions you have either relating to the degree or actual work. If your immediate peers are not able to help you they will still be able to refer you to someone else within their network who can answer your questions, everyone is eager to help to answer your questions whether you are familiar with each other or not.

We are provided a skills coach by QA who advises us on our work-based portfolio as well as general advice. The skills coach also keeps track of the amount of time learners are dedicating to their degree. QA also run online meetings with advice for writing and structuring assignments with tips on things like making bibliographies and abstracts. You are also able to get in touch with your module tutor to ask them any questions you may have via email or QA's portal called Canvas.

The learning within the qualification so far has not been relevant to my role whatsoever, the subject of the degree is much broader than is required for my role and means some modules are totally irrelevant compared to what I'm working with. This is not a huge issue as I'm still getting a wide range of experience with different technologies and concepts while studying the degree. Some aspects of the degree are more relevant than others of course.

There is a variety of extra-curricular activities to get involved in mostly organised by the Life@ team here in Warwick, they organise things like quizzes, charity events like cake sales and volunteering oppurtunities and various cultural events to celebrate the diversity within Accenture. All of these events are good fun and are a great place to network with other people at Accenture that you aren't usually exposed to. Currently there are no sports events or teams.

No

Because I think everyones experience is going to be totally different at Accenture and where my review of the apprenticeship might be poor another persons could be very good, the inconsistency in the experience here is the main issue as each apprentice is treated completely differently based on who is well-liked as opposed to how much good work they've done, if you get on well with the powers that be you will find many good opportunities here but otherwise you'll be left to older, less exciting projects that don't look as good on your resume and therefore will further limit your advancement.

Be yourself, just because you don't get a job doesn't mean the job was too good for you or the process was too difficult, it means you weren't a good fit which works both ways, you may not have enjoyed working here for any number of reasons so just act natural and if you are hired great if not you can find a multitude of other companies offering similar opportunities across the UK.