Graduate Planner Review

I provide planning consultancy advice to developers and other land owners/interests in relation to developing property. This often involves doing an initial site appraisal, submitting applications, liaising with the Council on behalf of the client and making sure projects run on time and in line with expectations.

I have developed my written and oral skills quite a lot as my job requires me to take in a lot of technical information and relaying it to others in a comprehensible way. I have also developed great time management and organisational skills in order to run cases to schedule.

I enjoy that I get to be exposed to really interesting and cool projects as well as learn so much from on the job experience. The learning provides a good theoretical basis which pairs well with experience.

The organisation and structure of the programme can be improved immensely. I do feel let down with the unclear timescales associated with this route and the repetition of tasks/materials i.e resubmission of the Reflective journal and extra steps beyond the traditional route which does make it questionable as to whether its worth doing an apprenticeship compared with doing a masters in a year.

I think the employer wants to provide the support but are not necessarily able to because they do not completely understand the route and the difficulties associated with it. Whilst its fine to explain the challenges it does not mean that they are able to understand them nor offer the adequate solution to them. This largely stems from not going through the process themselves and also not being trained in this area to provide specific support.

My training provider provides training days for graduates which are helpful. I do think there is room for improvement, especially for apprenticeships and those that study part time.

The qualification certainly helps with understanding and enables me to learn so much more.

There are many extra-curricular activities - so much so that it is hard to keep up! There's a lot of networking events, social charity events and sports events including Property Triathlon.

No

I would recommend Savills to a friend as a non-Graduate. If they are coming in as a Graduate on a non-cognate basis it will be challenging with the little understanding of issues from the apprenticeship team and therefore limited capacity to respond appropriately to them.

You should be sociable and want to connect with people from all sectors in order to learn as much as you can. Networking is the key.