IT Apprentice

[abillybob]

Just checked - the grants are available until Dec 2014.

I'm confused does this mean they pay you £1500 and the Apprentices wages are covered by them too or would my school for example still have to pay them????

[GREED]

The grant is for supporting the extended learning of the apprentice. It is definitely not supposed to be used to pay wages

[Leeoakley]

School still pays as normal the wage you set.

 

After 6 months (i think) you can claim £1500 back as a one off.

 

Does that make sense?

[abillybob]

Ah got you! Haha it all just started confusing me! Pfft wish my school would get me a technician could really do with the help! meh what ya' gonna' do!

[Garacesh]

I'm certainly not looking to make trouble, but you should have had some structured training and activities, not just left to work and them come see how you were getting on. Perhaps that was what your qualifications required, but from personal experience and passion, I would have wanted to give you plenty more training, in IT, as well as building life skills such as communications, customer care etc etc. A good example of how each training provider is different.

 

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

When I started my apprenticeship I had to attend College once a week, for around two hours. The tutor there was rubbish. Barely taught anything, and we had to do tests at the end of the 'course' (which was about two months into my apprenticeship, bizarrely, so I'd actually missed most of the 'content'). By the way, we weren't tested on locked-down test machines, we were on regular machines with internet access! I did notice a couple of pages of Google on some of the other students machines. Maybe the test was partially could we find out answers if we didn't know them? I guess that's part of our job? Either way, I didn't bring it up.

 

Anyway, so after 2 months of not-really-learning-anything we had to mock up a network diagram to spec in Visio, list the 7 layers of networking.. Um.. One of the questions was asking what things you'd need to make an ethernet cable (2x RJ45's, crimp, bung, etc).. Not particularly in-depth stuff by our standards (except maybe the networking layers) but difficult to someone who didn't have much knowledge of networking or IT.

 

The other part of the 'exam' was diagnosing and fixing a networking issue between two laptops. Turned out to be the subnet mask was set wrong. I had to do it twice because rather than doing ipconfig etc I immediately went for the network adaptor settings, declared "Oh, there's the issue!" and resolved it there-and-then.. Apparently, when they ask "Well, how did you know to go there?", an answer of "Well, besides the cable itself, that's the first port of call." isn't a good enough answer. So the tutor outright told me step-by-step what I had to do to get the marks (load up cmd, ipconfig on both machines, screenshot, screenshot each step in getting to the adaptor settings.. really baby stuff)

 

Thankfully, my colleagues at work were giving me training periodically, things like IP addressing systems, subnets, etc.

 

Oh, and I had to do some 'Key Skills' lark because apparently my GCSE B in maths "isn't valid anymore". Wat.

 

As for being visited on-site, I had some obnoxious waste-of-time show up every now and again to see how I was getting on. I guess he had to, it's his job and all, it just felt very intrusive the way he did it. He had an air of self-appointed superiority about him whilst also painfully trying to come across as a peer or friend. A combination that I particularly found bothersome in all honesty.

 

The whole experience was a shambles and I'm glad it's over and done with.

[Leeoakley]

The issue is the qualification.....and what its supposed to show.

 

"The whole experience was a shambles and I'm glad it's over and done with." Can I ask if you are now fully employed in a role that links to the NVQ you took?

 

Although doing the NVQ is usually a pain, its great if you need to sit in an interview and say I have experience.

 

Training varies across providers, not great.

[TomCollins]

Oh, and I had to do some 'Key Skills' lark because apparently my GCSE B in maths "isn't valid anymore". Wat.

 

The theory is you have 5 years to 'spend' (gain A levels, get an apprenticeship, etc) your GCSEs before they are worth less than the paper they are written on

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using EduGeek

[Garacesh]

The issue is the qualification.....and what its supposed to show.

 

"The whole experience was a shambles and I'm glad it's over and done with." Can I ask if you are now fully employed in a role that links to the NVQ you took?

 

Although doing the NVQ is usually a pain, its great if you need to sit in an interview and say I have experience.

 

Training varies across providers, not great.

 

Yes, once my 1-year apprenticeship was over I was employed full-time and have been here since.

Makes the NVQ 'worth it' (though maybe not 'worthwhile') - I would have much rather spent the two hours I was at college at work learning more things, personally. College was just 'a hoop to jump through'.

 

It shouldn't really have felt like a burden, but it did.