Scrum Master Review

My role has varied with the team as the organisation I work for is going through changes to the ways we work and becoming more agile and reducing hand-ofs. My role has been an estimating the costs of IT infrastructure designs and also contributing to the designs. Over the course of the apprenticeship I'm now a scrum master for a feature team that delivers the IT infrastructure projects.

I've developed my coaching skills, my excel skills and people management skills. I've learned a lot about how IT infrastructure goes together for a bank and how we can upgrade it. I've enhanced my network and I've been encouraged to go out to different teams and learn more about what they do.

I love the day-to-day, but really dislike the apprenticeship tasks and how they're posed. It's very online based with not much progression, there are units that are thrown together in not a very chronological order, like learning about testing IT systems before we know the architecture and how computers even work at a fundamental level.

As above, very poor. It's got better but there are still silly things that make it hard to follow. Year one was level 6 and year two is level 8 and many of the tasks have exactly the same problems or questions to answer with maybe 2 added on.

I recieve lots of support from my team, they're great at helping me understand more about how the organisation works and how it relates to my apprentice tasks. I've got 3 mentors and I meet with them regularly and I lean on them for different things, one of my mentors have been with the bank for a number of years and knows a lot of people in different teams so I'm able to get introduced to other areas. One of my team has worked in a few organisations doing similar things and is able to give me different perspectives on how IT systems can be put together.

At the beginning there wasn't much support at all, through us making constructive complaints and feedback we are now at a point where we receive a lot more support. We have got more classroom sessions where we can learn more about IT from a brilliant tutor. We have no advisor at the minute and it's been that way from December 2018. We've all had problems with work getting marked from before October 2018. We're still waiting on it being marked.

It helps me as I've not been able to get any real IT qualifications from school as the classes were very limited. I've naturally picked a lot of things up by myself and from my courses I did in college in sound engineering, where we learned a lot about digital audio and how it works.

There is lots of encouragement from my organisation to get involved with charities. Every employee gets 3 extra days to take off their day job and put into a voluntary cause. This can be split into hours so you don't have to take the whole day. There's a leisure centre in the area that offers discounted membership for employees and they also encourage health checks. The organisation has a few events each year to network and socialise with your team and others.

Yes

RBS is a great place to work. They treat you like a person and not "a bum on a seat" like some other employers. They really want to develop and retain their staff. Everyone is really friendly and will take time out of their work (where appropriate) to help others with things. You also get to work from home which can really help your work-life balance, especially if you're like me and do a lot of things outside of work.

Look on their careers website and in particular, their early careers area. There's loads of information there about it. I used most of that information when applying and it really helped me. Do be aware it might not all be what it's advertised to be, particularly with the training provider but the work you'll do will be really great.