We asked Max a few questions about his Apprenticeship and winning this award...

1) What is your Apprenticeship?

My apprenticeship is a Software Developer apprenticeship.

2) Can you describe some benefits of undertaking Apprenticeship based training?

I have found that the benefits of undertaking apprenticeship based training include being able to learn on the job as well as gain a relevant qualification at the same time.  The skills that I have learned from my training have tied in nicely to my job and has helped me to work better. When I first started, I found that by shadowing colleagues I would learn a lot and this really helped me to build a solid understanding of the software that I work on and what the best practices are for developing a system. More recently I have had the chance to share my knowledge that I have learned over the last few years with new team members and I have found that by teaching others is a great way to learn.

3) What was your reaction to winning your award?

I basically looked around confused about how I had won it because I really didn’t expect to, but I was very very pleased!

4) What would you recommend to anyone else considering an Apprenticeship/taking on an apprentice?

Absolutely! I would definitely recommend an apprenticeship to others because the skills that you learn on through your training and on the job are skills that you will use for the rest of your working life. I would particularly recommend a Software Develop apprenticeship because it allows you to get stuck in and learn a system and write code pretty much straight away. I also think that by “doing” is the best way to learn when programming and an apprenticeship really enables you to do just that.

We asked Matthew a few questions about his Apprenticeship and winning this award...

1) What is your Apprenticeship?

My apprenticeship is in Business Administration and my role at the university is Administrative Assistant in Personnel Services. I work, primarily, with the Adverts team and Reward Team as well as the HR Policy Team.

Because of the nature of my role I am often in contact with lots of departments across the university, from Chemistry to Clinical Neurosciences... Each department is frequently looking to hire new people to fill new roles and so it is my job to help make sure these roles are advertised on our website and with over 13,600 staff working for the university currently, you can appreciate that there's always plenty to do!

My daily responsibilities include emailing new job adverts to external job sites for them to advertise, managing the adverts team inbox, answering a wide variety of queries from HR staff across the university, grading new jobs or completing regradings on behalf of the reward team, Adding job adverts to our site using a web content management system and completing research on market pay to collate data on median pay for various job roles across the UK as well as a few other bits and bobs such as comparing financial information from other universities with Oxford University and helping the HR policy team with surveys and indexing old papers etc. I also order stationary for the office and manage the petty cash tin.

2) Can you describe some benefits of undertaking Apprenticeship based training?

 I was actually studying as an undergraduate in my 2^nd year at another university myself when I decided it wasn't for me and I wanted to do something else instead and in my opinion the work experience and knowledge I have gained from my apprenticeship has been far more valuable than what I was doing before and will look really good on a CV too, not to mention I'm now getting paid instead of getting in debt!