Systems Engineer Review

My role varies on which team I am current doing my placement in. Four days a week I am expected to, either, come into the office or work form home with my team. The remaining day I am expected to attend college to work towards my qualification. During work hours I am given a range of tasks that require me to complete them asking for support when required for more experienced team members. I also have to dedicate a small section of my time to complete a an objective. This is a task that is outside of my placement scope of work. This may be something like organising an open evening for schools or creating resource pack for early careers.

Since starting this placement, I have been able to develop new skills and solidify some of my existing ones. I have been able to do this both during work and college time. At work I have been able to develop technical skills related to a given piece of work as well as improving my ability to effectively work as part of a team. At college I have learnt new concepts in electronics, mathematics, design and management as well as providing an opportunity to help concrete and further my existing skills and knowledge on given concepts I have already touched upon.

I would say that overall I enjoy my apprenticeship. I find that I enjoy working in my team and being given opportunities to test my skills and learn new knowledge about my work. However, there are some issues. We have had some issues with our learning at college which has knocked the confidence of me and the other apprentices. This issue is now being rectified and we are being treated with an appropriate amount of extra help.

I would say that the organisation and structure are a bit of a mixed bag. There have been some issues at college where for multiple months we had a lecturer that did not teach us anything. But this problem is now being fixed and missed teaching is being re-taught. This, truthfully, is at the fault of the college and not my employer. Other than this the course that I are studying is not related to our work. We study an electronics course but at work perform systems engineer placements. But our managers do have a good structure to our learning within the office space which is well structured and organised.

During the first year of this apprenticeship there was an extremely limited amount of contact initially due to the fact we attended college full time and did not attend the office. However, after raising this issue, there was there a monthly catch up with all of the apprentices. Once starting work in the office there has been a massive amount of support from our managers since there is much better avenues of communication.

There have been some issues with support with obtaining qualifications. There was a period of time when for multiple months we had no teaching form a lecturer nor a finalised assignment for us to work from. Once this issue had been identified and a new lecturer brought in they were unreliable and failed to turn up on time and on multiple occasions not at all. This lecturer was then let go and a new lecturer brought in. This lecturer has been able to provide teaching, however, the amount of time we went without a proper lecturer means we are far behind on teaching. We have been given confirmation that this will be taken into account when grading our assignments. Also we have have attended some extra support sessions in an attempt to catch up on work.

I felt that the qualification that we are working towards does not have a great deal of relevance to the nature of work I undertake. This is because at work we perform system engineering placements. However, at college we are studying the design and analysis of electronic circuits. We have, as part of the course, covered some project management sections. However, this is not a role that I perform at work but I do see in action via the project managers.

At work, there are multiple social activities that take place. This can be either organised by the business for employees or by an employee for fellow employees. These cover a range of activities and events. Commonly emails are sent out to early careers (graduates, apprentices, industrial placements) notifying upcoming events in the calendar.

Yes

I would recommend BAE systems to a friend because I feel that, as a company, they offer a great working environment with a large amount of support for whatever you might need. There are also a large amount of opportunities within the company, with it being so large. This means that there are loads of different areas to slot into. This means if you are unhappy with where you are there is much more chance of finding somewhere right for you.

The advice that I would give to someone applying to BAE systems is to make sure that you do enough preparation as the application process is quite lengthy. There were a lot of questions to answer so it pays to make sure that you have an answer that fits as many questions as possible.