Apprenticeship Case Studies

I would say one way the support from my skill coach does help me in my role, is keeping me on my feet, ensuring that I don’t spend all my time in my program procrastinating.

So for example, in producing or providing our evidence summaries, my skill coach ensures that I’m able to do a perfect split of my time to ensure that by the time I get to my final year, I’m not under so much pressure. Especially being a mother of two.

It’s been brilliant being able to, you know, from the lecture side, being able to take what I’m learning in the lectures and take it into the workplace. This has been really very helpful with my learning from the skills coach side of things. It’s been very supportive. The communication between Ada, my manager and the wider organization, the Bank of America, has been super helpful, for my mental health but also for my wellbeing and my career.

They’ve been very helpful during my apprenticeship.
So my skills coach, she advised me on what I could ask from from my coworkers for my assignments. For example, there were times when I was stuck on, my reflective statements. I would be thinking about what kind of evidence could I use for this assignment from work. And I would ask my sales coach and she’d be like, you can ask your manager for this sort of certification or, you can do this kind of work in the spreadsheets, things like that.

They also helped me because there were times when I would have upcoming conversations with my manager. So things like reviews and all of that. And my skills coach would give me sort of things I could bring up to help me get a better rating and my reviews at work, so I could say things like, I worked on these kind of projects and the, the, the they have helped me.

I would say please go for it. Get high and apprentice. We know apprentices. I mean, call me without no experience. But please don’t be deterred by the fact that young person does walk into an organization having no experience. One reason why I say go for it is the opportunity to be able to have a very fresh plate, fresh mind out of college and then being able to work on that mind and then form that mind in a way that is very suitable and very beneficial, not just to your team, but to the entire organization.

And maybe who would say, would you say, maybe talk a bit about, apprentices attitude? You know, when you come into an organization being really keen to learn and contribute? Yes. So I would say I know the reason to hire apprentice would be the fact that apprentices always come with very curious minds because, when you when you do come out of college not having an experience, there’s that eagerness to learn.

You want to learn new things, you want to meet people, you want to upskill. So having that curious might also even fresh perspectives when working on a project. And then you could have people who have been in that field for like 30 years. So sometimes they can be quite limited by the fact that they’ve been in that field long enough.

But sometimes having opinions and feedbacks from very fresh minds and fresh perspectives can be a huge plus to the project.

Absolutely. Go ahead and do it. There is sort of no risk. Be completely honest. You know, you bring in someone at 18, 19 as apprentice. They are very fresh in the industry. They want to know as much as possible. So 100%.

In three words. I would say focused. I would say, purpose oriented.

And then lastly, I would say supportive, or I intentionally put supportive as the last because I have been a very strong beneficiary of the support system Ada does provide, and I cannot emphasize this over and over again. Starting my apprenticeship, just when my baby was six months, my second child was six months. I think it’s really touched.

Very it really touched me very deeply. Seeing the immense support, especially especially during my lunch pod, the, support I received from Ada because I’m just before lunch started, I was really anxious. I didn’t know how it was going to go. I even had a dedicated room where I could breast or express my breast milk. So the support was just very immense and I would always be forever grateful, not just to every single member of staff who always ensured that I was doing very well mentally, physically and otherwise.

So I think that, companies should take apprentices from not only a lot of other places. Because I just think that especially in this economy currently, it’s difficult for young people to get their foot in the door in terms of starting their career.

So by helping, younger students to get that work experience, which is incredibly difficult to get, especially after graduating university, it would just help young people learn so much more useful skills that they can apply in the real workplace that they wouldn’t learn in a traditional university setting. And what would you say? Sort of what’s, makes them different apprentices in terms of their mindset and their how keen they are and what they bring to a company when they start.

I feel that, compared to traditional uni graduates, apprentices are much more proactive in terms of their work, so they are more likely to be able to make decisions that benefit the company. They are more able to communicate, results and other things to stakeholders in a more clear manner. And they are able to, They’re just more confident.

Yeah, I mean, as the apprentice, he starts off in, you know, the very beginning of your career. There’s sort of no expectation of, you know, fit. So you really are able to ask as many questions as possible and learn on the go.

As a graduate, there’s sort of an expectation on you that you should understand what’s going on because you’ve completed your degree. So you kind of get thrown into the deep end a little bit more as an apprentice. I love being able to have this free roaming, to ask as many questions as I want, and really learn what’s going on from the start to the end.

But what do you say then early on? After the initial phase of, you know, being inquisitive, you do some similar work to the graduates? At the end, you know, we all end up in a similar place. But definitely as an apprentice, having that free range to learn the different sort of career paths that I can go down have been great.

Supportive. Inquisitive? and driven.

Let’s say was kind of a weird one, but sort of like exponential growth. Reason being, because students usually start, they have no skills, but when they come to Ada, those skills are built on a lot and more and more and more until they get to a point where they are employed. Confidence workers who like what are they doing in life?

They’re able to contribute to the business. And yeah, they know how to carry themselves with confidence.

So the skills that I have developed, come in, the technical category and also the soft skills that I’ve developed at work. So from a technical side, I’d say I’ve developed skills in SQL. So writing queries in the database to pull up data, I have developed skills in Tableau.

So data visualizations, which involves creating charts and graphs and all of that and also Microsoft Excel. So I’ve learned a lot about manipulating the data in spreadsheets and presenting them to stakeholders in a way that they can make a conclusion out of it. I’ve also developed, my skill in communicating results to stakeholders. So my job as a business analyst is to sort of act as a bridge between the developers and the stakeholders.

I need to communicate what, the stakeholders need to the developers in a way that they would understand from a technical standpoint, and then vice versa. I would communicate to the stakeholders what the developers have completed in a way that they would understand. So without any technical jargon, and that also brings me to the soft skills. So communication, as I’ve said, I’ve been able to communicate to different sorts of audiences.

So technical audiences, non-technical and that’s really helps me to become more confident in speaking to people and wording my answers in a way that would help benefit the business in a wider sense.