Apprentice Project Coordinator Review

I am a Project Coordinator for Enterprise Field Services Projects Team, i deal with organising and managing project contracts for business customers, i organise the booking of engineering time, and resourcing of engineering tasks to make sure that the customer has an engineer at site on the requested day to complete the required works first time.

I have developed my IT skills quite a lot, as all of our project records are kept in spreadsheets, with organised references for the booking of time and engineering tasks being kept to look back on and track. I have also developed my time management skills and ability to work well under pressure as there is quite often tight deadlines in my role that we have to deal with and be creative to get things done.

I enjoyed the working aspect of my programme, however i felt that the job role i was in and course i was put on were mismatched to an extent, i work to project managers and never deal with end users, yet i was put on a generic customer service practitioner level 2 course.

My programme was extremely well structured through the first 14 months, but when it came to booking my end point assessment, it was a bit of a struggle, i had to complete face to face mocks, but after my assessor called in sick i was allowed to do them virtually which in my opinion should have been done in the first place to save time and get me to assessment faster.

I received lots of support from my employer over the course of my programme, my line manager was amazing the whole way through and was always asking what she can do to support me as well as sending me on shadowing days with field and workshop engineers to experience other areas of the business and help me to create a direction that i'd like my career to go in.

I received quite a lot of support from my training provider over the last 18 months, my TDO was very helpful in helping me create a backlog of my hours after i had fallen behind on logging them, as i was unable to go forward for assessment until i had met the minimum requirement of 370 hours spent training.

Due to the mismatching of my course to my role i feel like the learning on the job was a lot more useful to me than the course, but the course did provide a baseline of understanding around the different types of customer i may run into and have to deal with in my career.

There are lots of extra-curricular activites to get involved in, one of the other people on my course is now a part of the Diversity and Inclusion team, organising awareness-raising events and meetings on various disabilities and ethnic backgrounds / religions to help push to make the company more inclusive for all. and I am the care rep for my team, sharing any important wellbeing updates and having a catch up every month to see how the team is feeling.

Yes

They pay is good, the benefits are great, the people in my team are enjoyable to work with and nice to speak to. There are no limits to what you can do in BT, if there is a job role you can think of, we probably offer careers in it.

I would advise people to do a small amount of research on the company prior to any interviews, as although we are a large international company, the atmosphere at work is still that of a close knit business so it helps to know the history and how we got to where we are now.