Quality Degree Apprentice Review

The quality role involved assurance and control activities ensuring quality and adherence to regulatory requirements. The current secondment involves reviewing documents that are being rationalised and changed within the management system to ensure they meet mandatory standards. Development of the new swim lanes process flows for procedures is a common task within the workplace.

New skills include development o the swim lanes processes, business improvement tools such as SIPOC and the 5S tool, which contribute to streamlining business processes and ensuring waste is removed from processes. The review process develops skills in challenging behaviour and analysis of documents to ensure document review requests are properly responded to.

The current secondment is great, with engaging work based tasks to keep me busy throughout the working day and flexibility to work on the degree aspect of the programme. With regards to past secondments, they have not been as good. A general lack f work and engagement from senior workers left apprentices with little to do. The degree structure is not communicated effectively between the education provider and employer, nor are the requirements in place to ensure the apprentice completed the apprentice side of the degree.

The organisation of the programme could be better. Secondment planning does not seem to be concrete, we tend to be sent where we are told. The structure of the apprenticeship is in place but is often unclear, with no guidance as to what looks good when submitting work or even how evidence for tasks undergone in the workplace should be submitted.

The employer has a great support structure, providing apprentices with mentors that allow confidential discussions to take place. They are able to network extra help, provide feedback from apprentices to those who can make a difference and seek guidance. Support regarding work is in place and works successfully, and the company is always willing to provide help.

The training provider provides lectures, library materials, IT solutions, VLE's and out of hours mentoring to support working towards academic qualifications. The only downside is inconsistency between different lecturers' quality of delivery; some lecturers are excellent at teaching the content whereas others are much less familiar with the work they should be delivering.

Currently the academic side of the apprenticeship does not fully support the work role as it is Quality based, and the academia is engineering based. There are modules within the course to come that will better reflect quality but as I have not done them yet I cannot comment. The project management module has been useful in providing tools to apply in the workplace.

There are many events available to apprentices regarding out of work activities, sports, socials, out of hours networking and capability events and the ability to volunteer to help out at events around Cumbria and indeed up and down the country. There are notice boards, the marketplace and the intranet to advertise this.

Yes

The area of work sellafield provides the opportunity to gain experience on a nuclear site whilst achieving an engineering degree and gaining in office and hands on experience with processes, plants and scopes of work unavailable within other work places around the country. It is a great opportunity to work there.

Read up on the site, obligations and their goals. Have background in sciences, maths or engineering topics. All skills are welcome and will be utilised on and around site. Its not all about engineering and science; performance improvement, business events and other people related jobs are available to those who ask.