Software Engineer Apprentice Review

So how Accenture works is they hire 25 apprentices and have roles for about 5 of the 20, then pressure you into doing any role regardless of what your wanting to learn or what your studying on the degree, if you don’t have a role you “up skill” on your own on the “bench” everyday until they manage to give you a role, which they struggle to do. This leads to depressing long days left to your own, you can be on the bench for months at a time.

I managed to learn one skill testing while I was there luckily by securing a role after almost a year of waiting. Other than that a 4 week boot camp to learn code to someone who hasn’t done it before, don’t think that’s a skill you can learn in that short time.

I enjoyed my time with other apprentices while at Accenture and the boot camp. After that the start of the degree with no relevant work experience to match that, made the programme very stressful and intense. The bench system is overall horrendous and not a nice position to be in, a team is also there to “support” you on your time at the bench, although they never seemed very caring to your actual needs or feelings and more just plonking you into any role they find, if they manage to find one at all that is, so support was lacking. Combines this was not enjoyable.

I found organisation to be poor, for one as previously mentioned, way more apprentices than actual roles available meant people sat around doing nothing all day and not learning much. Also apprentice leader, not very on the ball with communication to apprentices and rather not approachable in general, which leads to poor communication

Little to none, I had lovely managers on my role. The apprentice team however minus one we’re not very pleasant to work with, rather more scared of there presence. You’d more get told off for simple mistakes or things out of your control such as having no role, even though that’s more the scheduling teams job to do, an absorbent amount of blame is places on you even though your already feel bad for not having a role in the first place. Which is great!. Sunderland uni offered help, however Accenture offered not much help to help complete your degree there

Little to none, they say you can speak to people inside the company who might know coding for example, when your 18 in a big company sat benched not knowing anyone, who are you meant to talk too? They don’t set this up for you, this is clearly daunting for anyone of that age and in a new company. Also half the roles you receive have no relevance to the degree your set up to do, meaning it isn’t an easy task to complete the degree

Role I had was testing, degree is technology with business solutions, coding, cyber security, networking and more coding. Those two don’t collide in any sort of way possible, meaning neither helped eachother. Lots of roles available such as PMO have no relevance to the training provided hence my rating

Yes there is some coding clubs etc available every so often if you have the energy to go to after beint left to upskill at work all day. There were other events such as teaching schools that you could get forced to do every so often if they needed someone, this was a good experience though

No

I just feel if your into coding already this is great, if not then no, it’s a real struggle to really do the degree. Also the bench and the roles and communication mixed leaves a rather unpleasant experienced, your sat to do nothing which is time wasting and not an appropriate use of time, however if you like upskilling on your own with some half decent resources then you’d enjoy it. There is also not much care for the apprentices and how they feel when they are in times such as the bench and I just didn’t find this enjoyable

Be ready to learn a lot of things yourself and really learn the degree on your own, a hard job. Prepare to not get a role doing what you want and brace yourself for the bench because it’s not an enjoyable experience at all, apart from that not much to say