Software Engineering Apprentice Review

Currently I work in a team that works in Site Reliability Engineering or also known as SRE. Day to day my responsibilities include monitoring some of the internal systems my team works on and creating scripts to handle customer data, I also work on a website that handles this data.

I have definitely learnt a range of different skills throughout my apprenticeship. As my apprenticeship is rotation based, I have been included in multiple teams throughout the digital sector of BT. Ranging from; QA, Human Centred Design, IT Asset Management, and lastly Site Reliability Engineering. I have managed to work on projects that work on different software languages such as SQL, VB, HTML, CSS, and more.

I do enjoy my programme to a high calibre purely due to the experiences and flexibility BT has provided me over the years to fully engage myself within the company and simply just absorb all the information that comes to me. BT truly do provide you with ample opportunity to learn skills that are valuable beyond the workspace.

In regard to working day to day, my programme has been structured very well. As I have previously mentioned, my apprenticeship is rotation based, so every 9 months I switch to a brand new team who have a whole regime of different things for me to work on during my time with them. However, in the academic side, it isn't exactly organised the best. I can't confidently say that my University experience was the greatest but I would still deem it as acceptable.

I receive a large amount of support from my employer, over the years they have provided me with several opportunities to allow me to broaden my skillset not just for the workplace. I have been involved in multiple volunteering opportunities and networking sessions with other organisations which have definitely shown me a different outlook on my industry.

If I'm being completely honest, the support that I receive from my training provider is very minimal. A lot of the time I am left to my own to figure things out in regard to my coursework and exams. One thing I can say though is that they have slightly improved this in the past year, but this was due to my cohort filing an official complaint to the university board and the proceedings from that.

I would say that the qualification in itself helps me by building a foundation of general knowledge in different sectors, such as software development, data & security, project management and more. I'm able to take these skills and use them to expand my knowledge while working on projects at work.

In terms of extra-curricular activities, I mainly indulge in networking events, whether they are internally held or organised with other companies within the industry. One recent experience I had was a couple of networking events between BT and Google apprentices, we hosted each other at both of our headquarters and were able to have an insight on how we work compared to them.

Yes

I would recommend BT to a friend purely because on top of providing an apprenticeship, they provide you with a framework to starting your career, especially with them. BT are heavily invested in building up apprentices to retain them as employees internally. Many of the long standing employees at BT all started as apprentices and built their way up the ladder.

Make sure that you are passionate about the role that you're applying for, you don't necessarily need experience in the area that your desired role is in, more so a genuine interest that you're keen to learn and build yourself to be someone heavily involved in that area in the future.