Sales Apprentice Review

My role with Sage involves answering webchats with questions and queries relating to mainly billing but also a whole scope of things to do with Sage Business Cloud Accounting and Sage 50. The queries I receive can range from resetting MySage logins to investigating unpaid credit notes on customer accounts.

I have developed my skills of dealing with customers that I have learned over my career in customer service. Having to speak to multiple customers at a time over webchat has really improved my organisational skills and taught me how to best prioritise issues to ensure that no customer has a poor experience when contacting us.

I enjoy the programme a lot as I am challenged many times throughout the day and I thrive off of this as it gives me an opportunity to further my learning and rather than shying away from these challenges I am encouraged to embrace them and then reach out for help if at any point I feel as though a query is too difficult for me, the only negative has been the apprenticeship provider NorthernSkills who have been a disappointment by not turning up to our apprentice coursework sessions and not setting work which is causing us to fall behind in our coursework. Sage have been fantastic with us.

As alluded to in the previous answer NorthernSkills have been very poorly organised and have routinely cancelled sessions with us without warning or reasoning. When the sessions do go ahead our trainer is very friendly and explains the content well, just wish that this was a much more frequent occurrence as like I said before I feel as though we have fallen behind.

We receive loads of support from Sage and they are always on hand to help with whatever queries or questions we have, they have assisted us in getting on contact with northernskills and getting them to actually put on sessions, when Sage contacted them we had some progress and our sessions were put on in a much more routine manner. (for about 3 weeks at which point we received radio silence from the apprenticeship provider)

We receive support during our sessions with the provider however as mentioned above there have not been many sessions with the provider so in this sense the support has been poor. When we do actually have our sessions the support is good and I've even been able to contact the provider for assistance with the work outside of our pre-determined session hours however this appears to have been a one off.

Honestly not much really. The training provider gives us the knowledge of how the business itself is being run in a general sense but all of the useful information I use in my day to day job I have learned just by doing the job and also by the training courses provided by Sage.

Yes there are events that I can get involved with provided by Sage. One of their incentives is giving all employees 5 foundation days that they can allocate in whichever way they please throughout the year which means you can take 5 days off of work ever year to assist with charities in the local area and ones that our close to our own hearts.

Yes

I would recommend Sage as they clearly care a lot about their employees and really look after us as apprentices. Joining Sage I was very nervous as I have never done anything to do with accountancy and maths has never been one of my strong suits but customer service is, Sage helped me focus on my strengths and then improve my weaknesses and for that I am definitely very grateful. I would NOT recommend NorthernSkills however, for the reasons mentioned above.

I would advise those who are applying to sage to be themselves and just show their true colours as the last thing they want is for people to hide who they truly are and put up a façade to fit in. They encourage and promote diversity and this is something that is embedded into the culture of the business successfully.