Apprentice technician Review

My role is to aid the shift engineers in the stars centre on their regular jobs. We generally do maintainence work on all machines and we escort and check the competency of the contractors that come in and do works on the machines. My role is learn from the engineers.

Since joining the apprenticeship I haven’t learnt much skills as working in a data centre doesn’t involve much works that would help me progress my knowledge and pick up new skills. My college is sort of similar as they are behind and haven’t been able to aid me learn or develop new skills.

If I’m honest I haven’t really enjoyed it since I have started. This experience of engineering has been very depressing as I haven’t been given a matrix to follow or some sort of guidance to what I should be doing in a day to day basis.

My programme has no structure that’s for both work and college. At work there is no matrix for me to follow and for me to progress in a desired way. This is the same for college as they haven’t given proper guidance to what it entails in the latter stages of this apprenticeship.

I do receive support in some areas from my employer, but the major areas where I should be picking up skills and developing there hasn’t been much guidance there. It is very difficult in a data centre environment as not much works go on for me to learn from.

I haven’t received much training from the provider, there has a been a lack of lectures and lot of staff have left since the my first year of this course. There isn’t much support towards my qualification from the college and I would hate for the time schedule to be extended.

I haven’t started doing any electrics at the training centre, my workplace is mainly electrical and due to lack of staff at my training centre we haven’t been able to start the electrics. Once we start that and I get familiar with that then I can perform my role better.

I honestly thought this engineering experience was going to be different where it would be easy to socialise or voice my opinion. There hasn’t been any extra curricular activities that I could get involved in, I would love to play football as I had previously played for a number of teams and enjoy it a lot.

No

Generally my experience in terms of politics going on at work, politics going at college, these kind of things make you believe that whatever is going on is bigger than you. I wouldn’t want someone else to feel as small as I am and have been since starting this apprenticeship.

I can’t really give advice to anyone joining as CBRE is a huge company and I’m sure other sites with different mindsets and different targets perform differently. I would not recommend them to join CBRE from my personal experience, but that isn’t exactly fair to make that judgment based on my own personal experiences.