Financial Markets Apprentice Review

The role will vary depending on the desk, trading desks will involve checking risk and rolling positions, forming views on markets for them day/week, and booking trades etc. Sales desks will involve also forming market views and getting them form traders to communicate to clients, presentations, meetings etc. It is highly varied.

My skillset has simply expanded beyond belief, the hands on aspect of being part of a team on a trading floor means you adapt fast or you sink. Excel, presentation skills, risk analysis, data analysis, numerical, and multi-tasking skills have all been improved, as has my confidence.

this once again depends on the desk, some desks will give you highly exciting and engaging work, whereas others will give you menial tasks as there is no ceiling to try and breakthrough, There have been plenty of pointless exercises simply to tick the boxes, despite this I greatly enjoy my day to day work on my current and past desks.

The program I signed up for is not the one i am doing now, the bank (through poor previous management and planning), voided the previous program with a higher level qualification with no forewarning. Since then contact has broken down somewhat, and the banks refusal to give any promises in writing to backtrack on them later makes it very difficult to plan ahead, and undermines the integrity of the structure of the program. This should have, and still needs to be better.

The bank has been rather supportive in everyday learning, if you have a query there is always someone who you can go to, and they will look to resolve it. there is good flexibility along with a building awareness of apprentices and how they compare to grads and interns, but from the angle of the actual apprenticeship, it feels very difficult to say the same.

Our provider Fitch has been a mixed bag, some trainers and courses are great and useful, others are quite frankly a waste of a day. Refinements need to be made in order to better assess which courses are needed and which are not. Despite being moved involuntarily to a lower level qualification, the support while on this has been strong, with regular catch ups, the quality of which however could once again be debated.

The exams are by far the most important and useful parts of the qualification, other than this there is no real benefit to the everyday job. Some courses in the qualification help to better your technical skills, but ultimately being on the floor and doing the work for your desk is where the progression takes place.

There are some extra curricular activities if you can find the time to get involved, some sports teams and societies. Some are paid memberships others are free, but there is little advertisement about them. The bank does sponsor a city 5k run, which is always good. Professionally, you will usually be exposed to dinners/lunches as client meetings, which are great for real world exposure, with lots of inside routes to other professional events.

No

I love this bank, and I truly believe here you get a far more hands on experience than other banks due to its smaller, more intimate nature. Many people are willing to give their time for you, something JP and Goldmans of the world cant. Yet the infancy of this program and the handling of the situation to this day, makes it very difficult to have faith in the apprenticeship going forward. As it stands, there are many better alternatives out there, that I would recommend people approach first.

People are this banks biggest strength, so be good with them. It is important to remain humble, and take in every piece of information possible, people will not hold your hand 24/7 so make sure you really want this, as you will need the drive when inevitably you have those rough days.