Repair Technician Review

The role included fitting parts and diagnosing customer issues based on notes provided by call center or store, if this was not sufficient you would call the customer to gain extra info about the fault, if certain parts were broken or faulty you would send them to other departments to repair them

The skills learn from the college are not useful for the job as you are targeted for volume rather than fixing the job efficiently so technicians have to push out as many jobs as possible, so the qualification of Electrical/Electronic testing is not used as another department fixes these issues so you only waste time if you attempt to test components

College side of the apprenticeship is okay as you begin to understand components and how to build small projects but again not useful at work with such complicated mainboards such as notebooks and TV's. If the qualification was hand in hand with the job it would be much more enjoyable

Poorly! Learning suspended several times with lessons not reorganized, off the job time which is a requirement of the apprenticeship is not given nearly enough to meet the 20% requirement for the apprenticeship, this is across several apprenticeships within the building not just the technical ones. It is almost like the business does not recognize they hire apprentices who will have to be at college and then are surprised when we have to do college revision and studying. Initially we were advised it would take 1 year and instead it has taken almost 3 years, regardless of COVID

Not enough, when we advised the employer that qualification was based on a component level job we were told that we have to make the most from the opportunity and try to tune the qualification to suit or role regardless that our assignments required evidence of us doing component level work.

College has been good at fighting with the employer to get us experience in the department where we needed to get exposure to be able to provide evidence of component level work, although this should have been planned in before starting the apprenticeship and should of had to be a fight to get

Not well. The role includes fitting parts and diagnosing customer issues based on notes provided by call center or store, which are not technical. The skills learnt at college can not be applied because this would slow you down from hitting target and therefor getting penalized, you have to leave the technical skills to another department

Every now and again the teams will get a small budget to do something small like a quiz or word search with a small prize for the winner but this is usually after a bad score on an engagement survey, other than this only team Christmas dinner is the only other thing which half the team does not attend.

No

For an apprenticeship the money is decent but once the qualification is completed its not really transferable as you do not put the skills into practice so all you have is the theory behind it but no actual real life experience and that is what employers look for when hiring people

If fresh out of school this can be better than college as you will have a wage and still study but Dixons need to reorganize how they do the apprenticeships if they want people to carry on, half of our group had left before finish the qualification due to the poor organisation