Cooling Development Engineer Review

My role varied widely throughout my apprenticeship, but I stayed within the Cooling department. I started off doing CAD, before moving into a prototype build support role and then for the last 3 years working as a project engineer for cooling modules. I now manage our radiator supplier day-to-day for the design, development, and supply of a full cooling module for the vehicle program I am working on.

I have learnt several skills specific to JLR systems and processes, but I have also learnt some advanced CAD skills and developed my technical knowledge, organisational skills and understanding of project planning. The latter proved most useful for my job and is probably the most transferrable skill, but I enjoy the technical learning the most.

Honestly I have found it tolerable. The education providers, Warwickshire College Group and The University of Warwick's WMG department, were generally poorly organised, and much of the learning was delivered dully and without enthusiasm, with the exception of one or two lecturers. The works itself I have also found tolerable - some tasks are incredibly boring, and I have not had any particularly interesting things to do in my apprenticeship. However I have grown to like my latest colleagues and the environment I work in is a pleasant one. I know a lot of apprentices have found the program much less tolerable than me, the attrition rate is relatively high.

The education itself is quite well structured throughout the 6 years, even if the education providers are poorly organised. Apprentices were split into learning streams based on their roles, in order to provide them with the most useful information, however neither the apprentices nor their managers were consulted on this and so the streams were not helpful. Within work the programme is not organised at all. The professional development path of an apprentice is entirely up to their home department, although with the right manager an apprentice can have a fair say in placements they do. Personally I didn't do any placements as I wasn't aware of this process early enough, and my managers never pushed me to do any. Some apprentices are passed around from department to department every couple of months, often getting fobbed off with boring work or getting trapped in roles they don't care for. I know of some who have managed placements well with their managers and they have managed to gain interesting experiences in their time at JLR.

I received good support from all my managers for my learning needs - I was given time off of work whenever I needed it to meet university deadlines - but many apprentices were not given any such opportunity. As with the structuring of the apprenticeship, this is at the discretion of the manager. I received lots of professional support form managers through my time at JLR, but my colleagues didn't actually always have the time to support me how I needed.

I received lots of support for my qualifications from my employer, I was given regular study leave in addition to the release for actual lecture and time at college. This was quite lucky as my managers were very supportive of my degree being more important than my job. I know a lot of managers believed university should only be done in apprentices' spare time, and so HR actually had to mandate a 20% study leave protocol in my final year (due to COVID-19-driven increases in learning stresses).

Very little of what I learned at college and uni are applicable to my job. Some fo the experience from college with manufacturing techniques helps with my technical conversations, but generally I have had to learn everything from scratch as I do the job. Similarly with my university education, I sometimes find it helpful in conversations with colleagues and suppliers, but never in my own role.

The extra-curricular activities were extremely limited for the first 5 years or so of the apprenticeship. We organised lots of informal occasions between friends, but JLR gave little to no support in setting up something, and there was seemingly nothing already in existence. In my final year we were made aware of the early careers network, which was annoyingly directed almost exclusively at graduates, and I have got the impression that some seem to think that they shouldn't be mixing with apprentices.

No

The pay is good, but not worth it unless you enjoy the actual job. If you want to learn about the technical side of engineering, you should go to uni, or even if you like one aspect of engineering, as the high level training you get at uni would better prepare you for choosing a specialisation that you enjoy. I have found myself in a specialisation that I'm not sure I would have chosen, and yet I don't have a deep enough education in this area to be a valuable resource in this field after my apprenticeship.

Ask lots of questions about the day-to-day role, make sure that your potential manager knows what path they want you to take over your apprenticeship, and then make sure that you're happy with that. Don't expect to get any traditional university experience (it's not the best of both worlds), and make sure that you're happy to commit to this career, because changing careers after this will be basically starting again.