Apprentice Technician Review

My apprenticeship was in software development but I worked in a hardware verification team, alongside two other apprentices on the infrastructure scripts that assist the engineers in their day-to-day tasks. This involved maintaining the Jenkins CI instance, writing scripts in Python and Perl, and adjusting the webpage in PHP. Daily interactions mainly involved my close team members (the two other apprentices). Us three shared the same line manager so we had sync-ups with him together around twice a week to talk about tasks/questions/progress. I spoke with other members of the hardware team too since they were our 'customers' or 'users' so their feedback was valuable. I would describe my role as sort of a support role to the engineers because they would come to us with queries, feedback, bugs, suggestions/requirements, and we would have to answer, fix, or implement new features.

I have developed many skills, especially in teamworking and communication. Working in a small team and closely to end users requires a lot of knowledge sharing so it was important to be transparent when I made big changes to the Git repository or if I caused a bug. Taking the initiative to suggest and make improvements was also a skill I got to develop. Arm had an enormous amount of resources for undertaking training, for example, courses by Doulos, LinkedIn Learning, and O'Reilly licenses. These covered technical skills and soft skills. I did a 2-day Python course by Doulos soon after I started my apprenticeship and it was very useful (quite intense though!) In terms of internal training, I felt that my team, and in particular my line manager, supported me well through the onboarding/induction process and helped me get used to various tools and languages with 'ramp-up tasks'. I have learnt a lot in my role, especially in terms of time management. We worked in monthly agile sprints, so over the course of that, I improved my workload predictions when we had to plan work for the next sprint.

This question is difficult for me to answer because I really enjoyed working in my team and the company culture. I went in with the expectation that I would be working in a software team (since my apprenticeship was in software development after all). I thought I might be working on helping build a specific program, with frontend/backend/analysis/design/testing work that matched the components of my academic training at Barnsley College. What I actually worked on seemed to have most of these components, although applied in a different way since we weren't building a program or application. I personally enjoyed this, and I enjoyed working in a hardware engineering team because I found their own work fascinating and I think I would have enjoyed my time less if I was placed in a software team. However, I did find it hard sometimes to align my Arm work with the apprenticeship criteria (such as analysis and design because these were components I didn't cover in my Arm work, so I had to do them specifically just to meet the criteria). This part I didn't enjoy as much because it felt as though I was doing 'useless' work (it wasn't benefiting the team or my work project) just to complete my apprenticeship. I must add though, there were other components that I didn't cover in my Arm work initially, but I spoke to my line manager about it and we were able to fit those in.

At the start, I had a set of introductory tasks to do to get familiar with the tools and languages I would be using. I had a huge amount of support from my line manager who was always open to questions and helped me through my work when I needed guidance. I was lucky enough to be working with two other apprentices who had started a year before me so they understood my questions and shared resources to help me learn. The work was organised and tasks were clear. We worked in sprints and tasks were delegated by our line manager depending on what we knew and what we wanted to work on. In terms of the academic side of things, Barnsley College failed my expectations. Our tutor had no enthusiasm for the course. She retired a little over a year into my apprenticeship, so the college took in an external member of staff to help us until they found a replacement. This external staff member was very busy and hard to reach because she now had to oversee ~6 more apprentices and only worked part time for the college. She gave helpful feedback on my portfolio/report but the communication between myself and her was extremely unclear and since I was nearing the end stage of my apprenticeship, she was vital in helping me complete the admin side of things (which took a couple of months longer than necessary). When a replacement tutor was found, he was absolutely incredible. We basically had to start the end-of-apprenticeship admin process from scratch (I still don't know what happened previously with the external staff member and why the process had not started). He supported me throughout the process and helped me practice for the final assessments. He picked up the retired tutor's apprentices very well and I could see he was supporting the others well too.

My line manager was extremely supportive. He offered guidance and answers to my questions. He also supported me in taking up more responsibilities. I could ask him endless questions and he would still take the time to go through and explain each one. He was also very understanding when I needed some time to work on my college work / revise for assessments. I did not have much interaction with the HR team. When I joined, there was nothing in place that bridged the communication gap between Arm and Barnsley College. I believe there is now a specific person in place that manages the apprenticeship program at Arm. This person helped us chase Barnsley College for information and updates, and took in our feedback on the college and apprenticeship scheme so it is now more structured (and they even have a different training provider for new apprentices I believe!)

I went through three different tutors at Barnsley College. The last one was the most supportive and helpful. Aside from the last tutor, I felt that the college was hard to reach and that there wasn't really anyone else we could speak to. It would have been amazing if there were at least two tutors at the college but when I joined, there was only one (and she was terrible at teaching and providing feedback). She didn't give the impression that she understood the course/process. I often had to chase up for email replies (for the first and second tutor). Overall, I did not enjoy my time at Barnsley College.

Since some of the apprenticeship criteria didn't relate exactly to my job role, it didn't always feel useful. I don't actually recall a lot of the information I learnt through my qualification so I would say that it didn't play a huge part in helping me perform better at my job. For example, learning the theory of software development methodologies didn't help me greatly even though we used agile sprints. The theory helps me understand the concept but this is not the same as practicing it so I would not say that it helped me perform better. I feel as though I know more about the software development industry and the sort of tasks that might be undertaken (since these are outlined in the apprenticeship criteria) but since Arm is part of the semiconductor industry (and I worked in a hardware focused team), I do not feel I know more about the industry I worked in.

Yes there are plenty but I did not take advantage of these activities (mainly due to covid). As far as I am aware, Arm holds Christmas parties, pub lunches, pub crawls after work, sports activities (such as football and squash), etc. These vary from office to office. Volunteering opportunities are available for employees to take part in, e.g. speaking to local school students to introduce engineering / promote STEM.

Yes

Wonderful company and culture. I felt supported by my line manager and my team throughout my apprenticeship at Arm. I could freely ask about opportunities to try slightly different work if I wanted to. People are very open to sharing their knowledge and what they do - I found it really interesting listening to others talk about what kind of work they're involved in at Arm.

I applied in 2019 and I believe the application process has since changed for apprentices so I don't think I can comment accurately on this question, but my general tips would be: - show passion for tech/coding/engineering/etc - if you don't know the answer to a question in the interview, just say you don't know and how you might find out or ask the interviewer if they can expand a bit more to help you understand (- do not pretend you know the answer and try to answer it vaguely!) - if you're given a technical challenge/problem to solve, talk out loud through your thinking instead of just presenting an answer at the end without any explanation