Linux Administrator Review

I worked in a few different roles as part of my apprenticeship, however regardless of where I was working, I spent a lot of time shadowing and learning off colleagues, later in my apprenticeship, I was trusted with more work until I was eventually an apprentice in name alone.

I had no prior IT skills when joining the company from college, to say I had developed skills during my time on the apprenticeship, would be an understatement as I learned nearly everything which has since set me up for my professional career, both technically and soft skills.

I very much enjoyed my time working technically within my team in the office, and the various social events arranged by management. However I did not enjoy my university study with BPP as much as I had hoped, however this is no fault of Nationwide, who were very helpful and supportive.

Nationwide were extremely helpful on a people level, every apprentice was assigned their own apprentice manager who worked alongside their technical manager in order to ensure their daily work was not harming their university grades and vice vera. There were also many options to progress quicker if you were worked above and beyond what was expected.

The technical development program's management team were extremely personable people who did everything in their power to ensure that all of their apprentices were comfortable and happy within their work areas. They also fought against the university for the sake of the apprentices who had been occasionally mismanaged by the University.

I personally was not impressed with BPP's level of support since it seemed so wildly different based on who you spoke to. BPP assigned every student with a support manager to ensure everyone was progressing as they should, luckily I never had a serious issue but the few times I contacted my support manager because of incorrect grades being given (and one unit not even being marked), I had to chase several times before I got an answer.

My role within Nationwide is very niche and therefore BPP did not provide much relevant information towards this role specifically. However, they did provide a good level of knowledge around the more common roles within information technology, for example, Networking, Security and Databases. This has been useful in my career even if not entirely relevant.

Pre-Covid, Nationwide did a huge number of social events, from painting schools and planting trees, to going bowling or playing football matches. However since covid, I have only seen one, however I believe it is harsh to blame Nationwide for this, as a huge number of our employees moved away from our offices. This may change again now people are returning to offices.

Yes

Nationwide as a company are extremely supportive and people focused. I don't think it's unfair to say that there's a better company to work for whilst developing your skills. Any issues I had with the apprenticeship scheme came as a result of BPP (our training provider), who Nationwide worked fiercely to help me deal with.

Ensure you show your soft skills as much as your technical skills, this goes double for apprenticeships as they're hiring you entirely to give you those technical skills. As a member focused business, Nationwide want to ensure their employees are helpful and wanting to learn more.