Business Apprentice Review

My role in Leonardo is rotational, meaning I spend 3 months in each department of the business and gain as much knowledge as I can within that time frame. This involves participating in meetings, going through basic training and adopting certian work packages, along with shadowing other members of staff.

In short - yes. I have certainly developed a lot of important skills such as communication and my IT abilities. Leonardo fund us to use a training provider called Coursera which has hundreds of amazing free courses to enroll on and complete in your own time which I have been doing.

The actual work itself I do really enjoy as I have a lot of interest in the defence industry. However, there was huge chunks of time where I would have very little to do and was practically ignored by my team (due to them being so busy) which wasn't great. The company culture is very good and I can relate to it a lot. To be honest, the programme has not lived up to my expectations and overall it was fairly average.

The induction was very quick and abrupt - could have been more thourough on areas such as logging your hours and where to go for training materal. The training provider PETA was outstanding and I would highly recommend Leoanrdo using them in the future - incredibly organised and clear with everything. The programme itself was in theory well organised, as in they had a clear placement plan for me that was rolled out to the relevant members of the business. However, the first department I went into had no idea I was coming and so had no structure to it. A lot of the placements lacked structure which led to me not having much to do.

When I ask for support I do very often get it and it is normally of high quality. From my placement managers they have always acknowledged my issues of lack of work and have seemingly tried to fix it but not much happens. The HR team have been useful when I have worked with them but they weren't very organised with figuring out my final placement and I had to take matters into my own hands. At the beginning of my appretnicehsip I had a lot of questions about basic activities such as where to go to log my hours and how to do various mundane tasks which I went to my Apprentice Training Officer for. Quite often I would get a response telling me where to go to find out instead of just supporting me there and then and telling me the answer.

I received a lot of support from my training provider, especially from my tutor. They were really good at conveying information and checking if people understood. I also had someone who would guide me through the qualification process and they were exceptional with supporting me. Their attitude was really warm and welcoming which made it a lot easier to come for support.

The qualification was only a Level 3 NVQ so wasn't that high of a standard. What I learnt thorugh my studies was fairly basic and I was already doing most of them and could have learnt the rest on the job instead. But the content of the qualification did include a lot of what I do in my daily routine at work.

There haven't been many company events since I have started but I did begin at the end of 2020 when Covid was around which I believe hindered this aspect of the company. There is a couple of 5-a-side football teams that play through work and I was invitied to go to them.

No

I would not personally recommend Leonardo to a friend purely based on my own experience. I get told frequently how great of a company they are to work for but I have only really experienced the financial side of this - which is very good. The lack of work is a major reason as to why I wouldn't recommend them, alongwith the company being making the emplyees purchase their own equipment such as monitors and chairs rather than supplying them when working from home.

I would advise you research the company and what the specific branch you were applying to actually does. Be confident and professional throughout the interviews. I am told the opportunities within Leonardo are very good but I am yet to experience this. I would have appreciated being informed in more detail about what the company actually does and the equipment they manufactured.