Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability Apprentice Review

My role is about being a social and environmental conscience for the business. My role varies from day-to-day, and could involve responding to colleague queries about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability, communicating and interacting with our charity partners or supporting a horizon scanning exercise to identify and enable the business to respond to upcoming sustainability trends. I am responsible for ensuring that colleagues feel supported and able to participate in CSR activities.

During my time at Mott MacDonald, I have learnt and developed a number of skills both subject-matter specific and transferrable. Particularly, I have had the opportunity to work on my time management, project management and communication skills through the variety and number of projects that I have been able to work on. I am really grateful for the opportunity to enhance these skills of mine as given their transferrable nature, they will be applicable in any role I undertake in the future.

As someone who had an existing passion in the area of social responsibility and sustainability, I have thoroughly enjoyed my programme so far. It has given me the opportunity to learn about these areas in further detail, developing my understanding of them enough to be able to use this in a professional setting.

The programme is fairly well structured and covers a broad range of topics within the Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) spaces. However, I do feel that the programme doesn't allow you to go into depth about one particular topic within this space, which means that in order to understand some more technical parts of the role, further research beyond the programme syllabus is required.

My employer provides me with support whenever I need it. This could be support with understanding content, adjusting my workload to ensure that I have time to complete coursework or helping me with time management. My employer also supports all their apprentices through a programme called 'Developing your Future', which aims to further equip us apprentices with the skills we need to succeed on the job.

My training provider has also been very supportive throughout my apprenticeship journey. They have been on-hand the entire time to answer any queries I have or support my learning in any way I need. This has been via email messages, one-on-one sessions and group learning sessions. This support has continued even as I approach EPA.

I find that the qualification has helped to improve my general knowledge of the areas of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, however I find most of the qualities I need to be able to perform my role have been developed through my experience of completing day-to-day tasks within the role rather than from content which I've learned throughout my course.

Within my office, there are a number of extra-curricular events provided, including sports clubs such as running or netball, regular drinks socials and professional networking events which can be attended through memberships of our organisation. The company also arranges an annual sports day event which engages colleagues from across the UK.

Yes

The company has a good culture and is a really nice one to work for, and the staff tend to be very kind and helpful. We have a strong environmental and social drive, which is reflected in our commitments to achieve Net Zero by 2040, which I really value when working for the company.

When applying to work for Mott MacDonald, I would encourage others to conduct research on the types of projects that we work on and be able to talk about what you like about us. I would especially recommend taking a look at our website to understand our purpose and how you think you could help us to achieve it.