Customer Services Assistant (Apprentice) Review

My role is within the Cultural Services department, encompassing libraries, heritage, and the archives. It is mostly about resolving customer enquiries but also includes managing the collections and supporting events.

I have learnt a lot more specific skills about library services or archive services and how these workplaces operate and the knowledge it takes for this. I have also built on my IT skills as I resolve a lot of this type of customer enquiry.

I enjoyed my apprenticeship programme and I felt it supported the work I was doing in a public library with a connected archive service really well. It was a bit rocky at the beginning as my tutor left after 6 months - in this period, I was unsure with how the apprenticeship side worked and how it really connected to the actual work I was doing. However, my new tutor was incredible and if only I had her the whole time I feel I could have managed a lot better!

It is well structured to accommodate working the job and doing the studying. It was never quite clear what types of units we would be doing and the platform they used was confusing and took me a while to understand it. I think that the introductory presentation could have been put together better to provide you with these lists that you can refer back to across the course length. Again, with the new tutor, everything was better structured and I did not feel I was missing anything and we could really get into the information for the monthly unit during our sessions.

It was great because I had my allocated day off for study period which allowed me to focus my energy to it each week. There was also lots of support when I asked questions about certain things and was really interesting to talk to the different back office staff about topics such as cataloguing policies to accumulate evidence for my essays.

My new tutor was a lot more supportive and would always provide me with the chance for a catch up if I felt I was struggling to write my essay even after our initial session on the topic. When I was struggling with the end project forms (which I absolutely hated) they were really helpful in understanding my frustration and getting me through it.

The topics supported the customer services role well and helped me understand the services I work for on a deeper level which usually comes with more experience in the role rather than taught to you when you start. I think I was quite proactive with everything and would always ask for advice or support as/when I needed it. However, it is very much geared towards the library profession rather than archives, which means that if this was your area of interest, you were not going to get much more new information from it.

There are societies run by the Council and various networking events; however, I have not participated in any.

Yes

I would recommend it mostly for the people working there - they are super friendly and informative and it always makes the work day that much better! However, the structure and the current difficulties of working in local government mean that it is getting increasingly difficult to be positive about the environment I work in, when we are short-staffed and struggling to maintain a clean library and keep up the smiles for customers!

I would say that they need to demonstrate the values of the company in their supporting statements; this is what they focused on in my interview and they are often part of the annual appraisal processes.