Apprentice Maintenance Technician Review

I am a maintenance technician apprentice which involves shadowing the maintenance technicians within the area I am placed in and learning how they go about locating faults that may occur and what they do to fix these faults. when following the maintenance to breakdowns I have the opportunity to ask any questions I may have about the equipment and the job they are doing

Over the course of this apprenticeship I have learnt a variety of new skills that can be used in the future for this job role. Within the first year there are many skills that I had learnt for example, welding, turning, milling and hand fitting. Also throughout the time shadowing I have had a chance to advance my communication skills as I am with the maintenance technicians asking them questions about the job role. the company also provide you with many different training opportunities like using a forklift.

The program has not been as enjoyable as I thought it would be first going into the job role. For a company as big as BMW itself the program should be run better as due to there being too many apprentices employed they have placed us on areas that have no relevance to the job role and it feels like a waste of 3 months. Out of the 6 rotations I have done I have done 3 on these wasted rotations meaning half of my time has been wasted on irrelevant areas.

I personally feel like this apprenticeship in its entirety has been extremely unorganized for a number of different reasons. The first and main one has been that the company has hired too many apprentices in the year I am currently in and the year below meaning that as said previously they have struggled to find areas for us to go to and when the areas have been found thy have been a waste of time and irrelevant to the job role I applied for. Another reason I believe that it is unorganized is because the paperwork that is required to be done by us as apprentices is not being checked/signed off for example I had given in a writeup we were required to do weekly and it hadn't been checked for 6 months when I had already left the area. The communication between certain people in the company hasn't been up to standard with maintenance technicians being unaware that we are supposed to be shadowing and seemingly trying to avoid apprentices. Due to management change these issues are slowly being fixed.

While in this apprenticeship I have had 3 different Training managers and since changing from the first one there has been a significant improvement of the interaction and support I have received from my employer. It has gone from the training manger barely knowing my name to having weekly/bi-weekly meeting with my training manager where i am able to voice any concerns or issues that i may have and if I felt uncomfortable speaking up in those meetings they are always available to contact through phone calls or messages.

I believe that Bmet has provided very little support in helping us to complete the qualifications and this is again due to a lack of organization we had to start our third year (HNC) nearly two months late due to a lack of communication and effort coming from the Training provider. When the HNC finally started which was already late numerous people had voiced their concerns about workload and the time we had to complete it all and we were told "Welcome to the real world" "This is higher education" and "Suck it up" with seemingly little going to be done about a solution for this. Roughly Four months into the qualification our tutor had quit and then there was a struggle to find a new tutor that could help us get through the rest of the Year. If it wasn't for our tutor in the second year stepping up and taking on an extra workload to ensure that we still had someone teaching us we would have struggled to make it further than that point.

The qualifications that we have done trough the training provider are in general useful skills that can be used and are helpful for us in the job role. Specifically in the first year we received training from the training provider that could and has been used out in our job role. In the second year the company had chosen the topics we would be doing making sure they were more relevant to the job role. the HNC was not mandatory however the opportunity to do it is Great and and topics are again chosen to best relate to the job role

There are very minimal opportunities provided by the company and if there are any we have been communicated very little about what we can do. the only kinds of social activities that have been done have been set up and organized by apprentices and have not involved the company in any way.

Yes

I would recommend BMW to a friend however this is not due to the apprenticeship and mainly because when in the job role itself there are many opportunities that are available and the training and qualifications that are provided and great to have. the apprenticeship itself is unorganized and underwhelming. For a name as bug as BMW they could do so much better in basic areas like communication and organization however there seems to be very little done. as stated earlier with the change of management there are slight improvements however my experience through this apprenticeship has been extremely bad#.

Having done work experience is helpful when applying to the company and having knowledge about what is done in the plant will be helpful as it shows interest and willingness to learn about what we do. In the interview stages the best thing to do is try to be as confident as possible and not seem nervous/scared as nothing bad will happen and the people in this place are extremely nice and welcoming.