Apprentice Quality Engineer Review

Attend meetings in the morning to review the previous day s activities and ensure that required stock for the day s build is available. Organising and requesting activities such as sorting and reviewing parts to provide containment of quality issues, working with other departments and suppliers to perform root cause analysis and ensure corrective/preventative actions are implemented.

Developed analytical problem solving skills , understanding of manufacturing methods and production processes used at suppliers as well as how to use root cause analysis tools to identify and resolve process failures and risk points. Developed data analytics skills, using reporting tools in SAP BO and advanced DAX for Power BI.

The role has a lot of variety, each day can bring a new problem to tackle and as your knowledge builds it is satisfying to be able to apply that to different issues and suppliers. However, there will be a lot of days when you spend a lot of time sat in an office in meetings and due to being a reactive job role your workload can vary a lot (it tends to be on the busy end).

It does not feel like there is an overall structure in place for the apprenticeship programme, it is dependant on how much your mentor plans the structure with you. If you want to go on placements elsewhere in the business, you need to find out what departments there are, who to approach yourself, and in many departments it is difficult to get involved as an apprentice.

Really good mentorship and good support from managers when you escalate problems to them. In my experience, I have always been respected and treated equally, and never had my position as an apprentice to discredit ideas/contributions. Unfortunately, if you have personal issues then HR/occupational health are really poor to support.

While there are exceptions, overall there is very poor communication from lecturers, assuming that you can get in contact with them at all. There is rarely any substantial feedback on work submitted - a grade and a few short comments at most. Additionally, some lecturers do not teach their subject, instead they are just reciting off Powerpoint slides or discussing irrelevant information.

Very few of the skills and knowledge gained in the degree are relevant to the day to day job - most are in design engineering, whereas my role is in quality engineering and process management which the degree does not cover. However, many of the skills and subjects the degree teaches are transferrable within the industry, such as electronics, programming, CAD, engineering management.

There are extracurricular activities available at work, however these are poorly advertised and a lot of people do not know they exist, such as golf, five a side football etc. There are lots to do in Chichester and the surrounding area, and my department often do social events.

Yes

The salary is excellent for an apprenticeship and good for the industry when you finish. You will work with friendly people who can teach you a lot, and the degree, while not very relevant to the job, offers a lot of transferrable skills that allow you to move into other industries.

Research the company and history so that you can comment on why you want to work there. Do plenty of preparation for the interview as well as interview technique, and practice the assessment tasks. Make sure to get as much information about what the programme involves as possible, the job description is not always very representative so make sure that you know if you want to do it or not!