Building Services Engineering Apprentice Review

It can vary a lot depending on the placement, some of the placements which include: Renewals and Enhancement (R and E) delivery area Major Programme Delivery (MPD) area Surface delivery area Commercial development, City planning T and D delivery area Special Purpose vehicles delivery area Ventilation Cooling Performance team Asset Operations (Stations Mechanical or Power and Electrical Teams) Depots Asset Operations You can be working on a major project or short term projects. Your placement manager will determine what work you will be doing, it may be report writing, modelling or admin/data prep.

Many of the skills you pick up are based on having to do them as a trail by fire. This area of the business is quite short staffed and deadlines are tight, for most placements you will be with one other engineer from your discipline, this person may be busy so you don't get as much contact time as you would like.

The Transport for London side is pretty good, you get a varied experience depending on the placement manager and role. There are lots of seminars and groups to be part of in the business also. The university side of things is quite stressful, and definitely takes away from the apprenticeship, however I will cover this in the education section.

Once again, the work side is relatively structured, the placements are set out, but not guaranteed, so you don't know where you are going next. The university side is set out quite well in terms of modules, however the individual lessons of the module and how they are set out could be vastly improved upon. I think the mentors we have at work could use more support from the university, perhaps in some form of documentation to give them, as there is often some confusion about what is expected from them.

I think in terms of wellbeing and admin, we do gain support. I would like there to be some training courses for the software we are meant to be using, they have created a guide as an introduction, however it is a bit outdated. I think learning depends on the placement manager and their workload. I think as well you have to be willing to ask a lot of questions, which I personally do not mind.

The quality of teaching varies form lecturer to lecturer. My main issue with this course is that a lot of lecturers tailor their lessons to people who have worked in this area, this makes things very difficult at times, as many of us do not have experience. The content provided by lectures is old, some as old as 2015, they are not the best of slides either, sometimes equations are used but not explained, so you have to reverse engineer the working out to obtain them. The past papers are only provided 3/4 weeks before the exam. You can email them questions, but they do not always reply. We are also meant to have a tutor, however no one has had a meeting with them and we are at the end of our second year.

Building services is a vast industry, that contains many disciplines (Mechanical, electrical, public health & transport) so the module you are studying may not always align with what you are doing at work. Sometimes I have had it where these have aligned, it did make it easier to understand some concepts, other times it has not.

There are many groups you can get involved with such as the Graduate and Apprentice Committee (GAC) and the Schemes Mental Health(SMH). These two are the most obvious ones that you will get emailed about, however there are more to find on your own, one apprentice has joined the Piccadilly line football team, another was part of the IMechE railway challenge and another was on the sustainability board representing graduates and apprentices.

Yes

This scheme is very new, so it is still going through some teething issues. I think TfL has a lot of potential, there are so many areas of the business so there will be something that suits you. Newer apprentices joining the scheme can benefit from the issues that we have had to overcome, and can ask us for support.

I would apply for other companies, as I think this helped during my interview when I was asked, it shows that you are in high demand. I would also look at the behaviours and competencies on the TfL site. I think this scheme normally doesn't get many applicants as people do not know what building services is, for more information see: Institute For Apprenticeships Ref:ST0372 LSBU Course Ref:5124