Electrical engineer Review

Prep aircraft for flight. Ground crew. Diagnostics. Fault finding. Testing and repair. Instillation and test of units. Testing of all aircraft electrical systems.

I have learnt many new skills that I never thought I would know. I know a lot more than when I started and my team have really helped me develop the skills I have so I can use them everywhere

I enjoy my time at work day to day with my team on the shop floor. However I did not enjoy my time at college as it was very disjointed and confusing in my lessons. I also do not enjoy talking to our training department as we do not feel that they try and do the best for us and very rarely do what we ask of them except write it down and forget.

I do not feel that there is any organisation in college or onsite. Most of the time we end up having to organise things on our own. Our college corse was disjointed and confusing to the point where some lecturers quit and we did not finish some subjects till the next year. Our training department are very disorganised and never know what is happening dispute the fact the same thing happens every year.

My team manager on the shop floor is always very helpful however training are not. Sometimes it has gotten to the point where we don’t want to email our training manager about things for fear that we will end up in a fight over something that should be simple like taking holiday or bereavement leave. If something badly goes wrong people get support but it’s never particularly tailored well to the situation.

We got good support from some lecturers. However most we had were used to teaching higher levels and could not explain very well If we didn’t understand. Some lecturers left halfway through courses and others taught us what they felt like. For some lessons we had 2 classes in 1 learning different qualifications from the same teacher and so we were left on our own in favour of the college students.

Practical and theoretical electrics helped in my job however I do not feel that anything else did. We had to learn business improvement which has nothing to do with my job role as well as CAD and composite construction. We were later told that these were “filler units” that didn’t help but the company wanted us to learn. However if we failed them we could still loose our contract as it counted as failure.

Apart from doing promotional events such as going into schools and talking about our jobs which I enjoy we do not have any of the other things. We have an apprentice association however they rarely organise events that include under 18s and so a lot of our younger apparentices (such as myself when I started) never got included.

No

Lack of organisation. College was too confusing and disjointed. The training department should be there to help you however we find ourselves doing nearly everything on our own. We are not helped and encouraged along by training. We are told things last minute, lots gets done late and not many compromises are made for people’s situations. Everything feels like it’s done by the book with no feelings or emotion for a persons situation.

Be prepared to do a lot of work for yourself and have to use external sources for college as you won’t find any help there. You need to be confident and able to express your opinion and stand your ground or you will get overlooked by the training department if you want something done.