customer services Review

no

Did not enjoy the programme

Not very organised

Little support offered. Left to get on with it. Study time had to be taken in the office but no provision provided or place to study. Left to work in a large crowded, noisy, open plan office. No other student would be required to work under these conditions. If you are required to complete a body of study then provision should be made - otherwise you should be allowed study at home. A lot of irrelevant form filling and box ticking exercises. I was required to take functional skills Maths and English because I didn't have a GCSE in Maths and English. Well, I won't, I was not educated in the UK. I do have a degree and teaching qualification though and this would require me to have the ability to write and read English to a high standard but I was still required to spend an afternoon completing exams in English and Maths and also required to prepare a deliver a PowerPoint presentation.

Sporadic - it was hit and miss. No planned timetable but very much on an ad hoc basis. Revision sessions needed to be better structured with a classroom approach to the subject matter as for a lot of the younger apprentices the background knowledge to for example the banking crash of 2008/9 just wasn't there. I am now 22 months into my apprenticeship and it is still not completed. This is not due to my part but I am waiting to have my portfolio marked and a Skype call arranged before I can complete.

Not at all. It bears little relevance on day to day processing for business banking which I perform in my role. Skills training in Excel (and not on-line skills training) but classroom based training would be far more beneficial. The certificate in retail banking is now no longer a requirement of the apprenticeship which says a lot.

There are opportunities for citizenship activities though my experience of trying to access them to date has been difficult. I volunteered to be a reader at a local school last October and I have still not managed to do any reading. One citizenship acitivity which I had signed up for was blocked by my team leader at 4pm on the day before it was due to take place leaving me very upset.

No

I did not find the experience helped me to gain self confidence in the work place. In fact it had the opposite effect. There is a high degree of supervision and control in the workplace but lots of lip service paid to diversity and inclusion and development. The reality for most here is very different. Perhaps this is the case at head office but here there is a close network of people who went to school together and live near each other along with many family members all being employed by Barclays which I don't think is in keeping with Barclays values.

You will find the whole application process slow and impersonal. It may take a long time to hear back from them. If you manage to succeed and get to interview the interview process is difficult for those would have not worked in a bank before which questions around a "control environment." Barclays will have recruitment freezes from time to time which you may not be aware of.