Project Management Degree Apprentice Review

My role consists of numerous areas of project management, from core skills such as risk management and aggregation and schedule management to delegating work out across members of the team and being the one who is accountable for getting things done! I work a lot with change control, and going through the process of escalating changes to the team and getting buy off on the work completed. As I am In a team that is working to deploy a new process, there is day to day work involving stakeholder communications and ensuring that messaging is consistent.

I have both learnt and developed skills on this course so far. The development of skills was evidence by doing the APM PMQ, and industry qualification to demonstrate being qualified in project management. The scheme teaches you the core skills needed to be a project manager and gives you an experience in a range of areas such as stakeholder management and contract management. One of the most useful skills is to be able to use the project management tools, as these are widely used. I still have some areas of the competencies that I am yet to tick off but should be able to in my next placements.

I enjoy the scheme and all the opportunities and the variety of work that we are given. Being able to work at the same time as gaining a degree means that there is always work to do and the placement work we are doing supports the university work we are doing. All the teams that I have worked with have been amazing at supporting me in the areas that I need and you always feel like a fully integrated member of the team. The scheme we are on has changed whilst we are on it, so isn't initially 100% what we signed up for but the outcome is the same and we still cover all the work that we need to.

Delegation, work load, placement support, manager involvement have all been really well executed from my experience. There are multiple avenues that we can go down should we have anything that needs addressing and managers are always helpful in trying to find ways in helping to meet the needs of the scheme. Having time to study in placement can be arranged with managers which has been helpful when evidence writing has been needed. The programme itself has changed since we have joined and the university side also hasn't been the most organised at times, with there being miscommunications.

We receive a lot of support from our managers in the business, as personally I have weekly 1:1s with my manager, as well as staying in touch with past mangers to help with my development. We also have an apprentice development team that we get support from in terms of our scheme mainly but they are able to support us through a variety of means. There are many other avenues for support in Rolls-Royce, with this being easy to find and access through a number of means. During furlough, it was harder to have as much support due to the circumstances, but both my manager and apprentice development leader stayed in contact, just on a less frequent basis.

We have all our training completed on one day so very rarely do we hear from the University outside of this. We are able to email them or arrange chats, but sometimes lead times for a reply can be quite long. We are assigned a member of the university to be our main contact and they aren't always the leader for the module. They have recently added in an additional session to support us through writing up evidence which is useful to have. We can use the support services offered by the university but we haven't had a lot of information on this.

There have been times that there has been some connections between work and the theory we learn at university. Learning about project management methodologies and risk, for example, have proven useful and I have been able to apply some of this work. University is largely theory based and as project management in practice varies between organisations, applying this theory can be difficult. The APM PMQ was useful to gain as the main UK project management board used is the APM.

There are always a range of extra curricular activities that you can be part of. These range from being just to do with Rolls-Royce, being involved in community activities in the towns near sites or to represent the company in activities such as Prince's trust activities. There is a wide networking circle where a large number of opportunities are advertised, with some being in the working day and other outside of work. At the Derby site, there is a welfare that hosted (pre-Covid) a large number of social events.

Yes

There are a large number of opportunities within Rolls-Royce, so there is definitely longevity to working here. They provide all the training that you need as well as a large number of other training courses that you can undertake if you have an interest in another area. The staff are all welcoming and willing to help in anyway they can, which I find particularly helpful as an apprentice. There are also a large number of benefits to working for the company, including share schemes and cycle to work schemes .

Don't try to be someone you're not. Personally, I have no engineering background or experience but that doesn't matter, they will teach you everything you need to know and you don't have to be an engineer to manage an engineering project. The assessors on interviews are not there to catch you out, they're trying to get the best out of you and I wish someone had told me that! Interviews are always going to be nerve wracking but the assessors are lovely and just want to learn more about you and want to make sure you would enjoy the scheme you're applying for.