HGV Mechanic Review

As a HGV mechanic, my day to day role is to repair and service military vehicles. Jobs are allocated to my laptop with the expected timings. Daily, I am expected to be accountable for every minute I am on site and must complete timesheets to reflect this without any gaps. Even though this is sometimes impossible to do.

I had zero experience in this industry before I started my apprenticeship with Babcock. Therefore everything I now know about the trade I have learned whilst studying my apprenticeship. I am now proficient at using hand and power tools and can diagnose and repair a variety of faults on a variety of different military vehicles.

At first it was good, then everything became slightly difficult.

The learning platform and structure of the apprenticeship I believe was quite poor. The college we attended have never run a HGV programme before and were making it up as they went along. To begin with, we did not even have any appropriate vehicles to work on at college. This was rectified in later years.

I think the amount of support I received during my apprenticeship was the minimum we could have expected. We often referred to ourselves as the Mushroom crew - as in, fed on rubbish and kept in the dark. We had 3 or 4 different managers during our apprenticeship, as each one inevitably left the role due to lack of support or knowledge of what to actually do.

To be fair to the college, although they were as they admitted "winging it" the tutor and staff were all very knowledgeable and keen to help and teach us. However while we were studying, the college itself made a lot of staff redundant and we lost at least 2 of our tutors. Which put a lot of pressure on the remaining tutors and increased class sizes.

Without the qualification I gained through Warwickshire Trident I would not be able to perform my role at all. However I do believe that I have learned just as much from just doing the job and being mentored at work which I believe is how apprenticeship are supposed to work.

We have spoken about doing some extra curricular activities for the past three years, and were told there was a budget for such things for apprentices. However whenever we tried to get more information about this or to organise anything, we were met with Stoney silence and a "ill get back to you" attitude from management. So in 3 years we haven't done anything extra curricular through work.

No

I would not recommend Babcock to anyone who is serious about developing and progressing a career in engineering or mechanics. The management system here is comical at best. There are definitely more chiefs than indians. Also the higher management in the company have zero interest or clue on how the workshop runs and make decisions to better the pockets of shareholders without a thought to how they affect the people who make the money for the company. The pay scale for a qualified HGV mechanic is woefully below industry standards and trying to effect any change here is impossible,

The advice I would give to anyone applying for a similar role at babcock is to not do it. If you are serious about making the appropriate money for your skill level and the amount of physical hard work the job involves, and want to feel valued in your job then you are best to look elsewhere as you wont find it here.